fbpx Biennale Arte 2024 | Rosa Rolanda
La Biennale di Venezia

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Rosa Rolanda

Azusa, USA, 1896 – 1970, Mexico City, Mexico


  • TUE - SUN
    20/04 > 30/09
    11 AM - 7 PM

    01/10 > 24/11
    10 AM - 6 PM
  • Central Pavilion
  • Admission with ticket

Rosa Rolanda was a multidisciplinary artist whose varied practice included choreography, photography, and painting. Although Rolanda described herself as a neo-figurative artist, it can be argued that Tehuana (1940) is influenced by the political project of Mexican Muralism – which often portrayed idealised depictions of Indigenous children, to embody a “pure” Mexican identity – and its modern style of figuration. Rolanda depicts a young girl with large almond-shaped eyes, deep brown skin, and rounded facial features. The subject, a girl from the isthmus of Tehuantepec, wears a huipil, the traditional garb of Indigenous Zapotec women. Some consider the Zapotecs a matriarchal society, and Rolanda, like her friend Frida Kahlo, wore the huipil as a symbol of feminist resistance in a patriarchal twentieth-century Mexican society. A hummingbird, an important symbol in Mayan creation myths, hangs like a pendant around the subject’s neck. This use of precontact iconography is characteristic of Mexican Modernism, in which many artists looked to indigeneity to create a revolutionary and culturally decolonised Mexican identity.

This is the first time the work of Rosa Rolanda is presented at Biennale Arte.

—Diego Chocano

Central Pavilion
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Biennale Arte
Biennale Arte