Teresa Burga’s mixed media sculptures, paintings, and collages have placed the Peruvian artist on the forefront of conceptual and experimental art practice for generations. Heavily incorporating elements of mass culture into her works, Burga freely reconciles pop subject matter with her unique Peruvian political, cultural, and artistic heritages to produce exceedingly complicated, humorous, and shrewd representations of the highly fraught relationships of gender and national politics. Much of her early output underscores the tense reality between the notion of femininity and a hyper-militarized post-war South America wherein women were secluded from political involvement on much of the continent.

A founder and major part of the highly influential Grupo Arte Nuevo, Burga’s early with the South American collective positions in a mixture of paint with multimedia collage discursive components of mass culture against isolated female figures. Her depthless canvases thrust out of the sign languages of mass culture detached matriarchal figures, creating a comically disjointed scene of the feminine figures unable, unwilling, or forbade to assimilate.

Teresa Burga (b 1935 Iquitos, Peru) graduated from the Catholic University of Peru in Lima in 1965, and received Fulbright Scholarship and MA from the Art Institute of Chicago. Her international acclaim has seen her be the subject of solo exhibitions at MALBA, Buenos Aires, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.