Sin titulo / Untitled

Teresa Burga is a pioneering figure in con-ceptual art in Latin America. She explores the pa-triarchal social structures that govern women’s lives. She shows marginalised female figures, such as prostitutes, women alone in the streets or alone in their home environment, focusing on the imbal-ances and inequalities of power between the sex-es, which she herself has experienced in Peru.

In her work Sin título [Untitled], Burga recreates a brightly coloured domestic space in which a fe-male outline is seen flattened on the surface of a bed. At first sight gay and colourful, this work soon reveals itself to be a critical reflection on the social inequities in Peru and on the situation of women in general. Burga’s work is often com-pared to American and British Pop Art, but she de-fines herself by her links with Argentine art. Pop Art at that time was a way of creating a subver-sive art for the new generation of artists, a “weap-on” against the “good taste” of the middle classes which were more attracted by American Abstract Expressionism.