Trinidadian-born, Caracas-based artist Valerie Brathwaite, known for her organic sculptural forms, has died at 87, Hyperallergic reports.
Valerie Brathwaite, the Trinidadian-born and Caracas-based artist celebrated for her organic sculptural forms, has passed away at 87. The news was announced by the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA) on Monday, July 6. MALBA recently hosted a retrospective of her work.
Born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1938, Brathwaite pursued her artistic education in the United Kingdom during the late 1950s. She attended Hornsey College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Her studies continued at the École des Beaux-Art in Paris, where she trained under the Cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine.
Her distinctive biomorphic style began to emerge after a 1969 visit to Caracas. There, she met sculptor Gego, who encouraged her relocation to the Venezuelan capital. Brathwaite moved within a year, quickly engaging with the local art community and developing a practice that stood apart from prevailing modernist and conceptual art trends.
Brathwaite's polychromatic drawings and sculptures drew inspiration from the flora, fauna, and geology of both Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela. Critics, as early as the 1970s, noted this geographical connection. Juan Calzadilla, in a 1975 catalog essay, highlighted her focus on horizontality, suggesting a "new 'aesthetic of the crawling'" rooted in South American culture.
This emphasis on horizontality extended to her material choices and display methods. Brathwaite utilized diverse mediums such as acrylic paint, concrete, and fabric, often rejecting traditional hierarchies. Her works were frequently presented directly on gallery floors or low platforms, underscoring their connection to the earth rather than academic lineages.
While her voluminous forms shared aesthetic qualities with artists like Barbara Hepworth and Jean Arp, Brathwaite cultivated a unique naturalist sensibility. She expressed a profound fascination with the "overwhelming beauty of mountains, rocks, stones, exotic plants," and human and animal forms, viewing sculpture as an expression of the natural world's sensuality.
The fluidity between her inner vision and external world occasionally manifested in music. Brathwaite, who identified as a "Sculptress & Dj," developed a "rich sound world" in the 1990s. This experimental approach, incorporating scratching, evoked the rhythms of jazz and freestyle, a musicality critics observed across her entire body of work.
Henrique Faria and Eugenia Sucre of Henrique Faria Fine Art, her New York representatives, described Brathwaite's essence as "truth." They encouraged, "Let the music play. Keep dancing, even when there is no music, Valerie Marie." A memorial service for the artist was held in the East Cemetery in Caracas on July 7.
