Paper

2000.27

PEP Permanent Collection Fund

Gift

1995

16 in

12 in

She Contains Multitudes (2020)

Cultural/Historical Context

La Barca III/ The Boat III Carmen Bordes (b. 1952) Aquatint, 1995 Carmen Bordes is a Mexican painter and printmaker from Guadalajara, Jalisco. She has lived and worked in several major art centers including Paris, Barcelona, Mexico City, and Chicago. Bordes is part of a generation of influential Jalisco artists working in the 70s and 80s which included artists such as Martha Pacheco, Salvador Rodríguez , Christina Cárdenas, Irma Naranjo, Jorge Monroy, and Javier Campos Cabello. In this work a family, in early 1900s attire, has been seemingly cast adrift in a small boat. They are accompanied on their journey by a large tree, its branches severed, with only the smallest trace of green clinging to its trunk. The title La Barca not only references the boat in which the family sits but also references a small town in the Mexican state of Jalisco, a place which Bordes would have been intimately familiar. Bordes draws inspiration from the great Mexican muralists and surrealist masters such as Frida Kahlo. For Bordes, surrealism is often more real to her than reality, a quality she seeks captures in her work.

Cultural/Historical Context

"Painter and printmaker Carmen Bordes was born in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1952. She graduated from Guadalajara's School of Fine Arts in 1980 and later studied lithography at the Allende Institute in San Miguel de Allende. Between 1981-83 she worked in Paris' Hayter's Studio 17. Since her first solo show in Guadalajara's Marchand Gallery, Bordes has exhibited in Barcelona, Bilbao, Tucson, Chicago, Mexico City and many other cities in Mexico. Bordes' prints have been awarded first place prizes from the Cuitzmala in 1988, the Metropolitan Print Open in 1990, Guadalajara's October Open Salon in 1991, and in 1999 in the Aguascalientes National Print Competition. In 1995 she received an honorable mention from the Latin American Biannual Print Competition. In 1998 she was selected to participate in Japan's Sapporo International Print Biannual. http://www.arceoart.com/bordes.html"