{"id":786149,"date":"2026-07-08T03:46:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T03:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/786149\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T03:46:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T03:46:12","slug":"valerie-brathwaite-abstract-sculptor-of-the-natural-world-dies-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/786149\/","title":{"rendered":"Valerie Brathwaite, Abstract Sculptor of the Natural World, Dies at 87"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Artist Valerie Brathwaite at her exhibition A Flowing Path of Her Own (2025\u201326) at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires. (photo Eugenia Sucre, courtesy MALBA)<\/p>\n

Valerie Brathwaite, the Trinidadian-born, Caracas-based artist whose undulating, organic sculptural forms reflected her love of the natural world, has died at age 87. The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires announced the news of her passing on their Instagram<\/a> page on Monday, July 6.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The museum, which presented a retrospective<\/a> of the artist\u2019s sculptures and drawings less than a year ago, described Brathwaite as an \u201cartist of extraordinary sensitivity, whose work was driven by her admiration for life and nature\u201d in the post.<\/p>\n

Born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1938, Brathwaite left her home country in the late 1950s for the United Kingdom, where she studied art and design at Hornsey College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Her academic training later took her to the \u00c9cole des Beaux-Art in Paris, where she worked with the Russian and French Cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine.<\/p>\n

\"\"Installation view of Valerie Brathwaite’s A Flowing Path of Her Own (2025\u201326) at MALBA (photo Santiago Orti, courtesy MALBA)<\/p>\n

However, it wasn\u2019t until after a 1969 visit to Caracas that Brathwaite\u2019s practice began to germinate into the intuitive, biomorphic forms for which she is known today. During this trip, the artist befriended sculptor Gego<\/a>, also known as Gertrud Goldschmidt, who encouraged her to move there. She followed the fellow immigrant artist\u2019s advice and relocated to the Venezuelan capital within the year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Caracas, she quickly became acquainted with artists, critics, and curators, including Mercedes Pardo, Marta Traba, Lourdes Blanco, and Miguel Arroyo. She began developing a style irreducible to the currents of modernism and conceptual art around her, consisting of polychromatic drawings and sculptures. These works, which attracted early art-world attention, recombined existing organic forms or imagined new ones inspired by the flora, fauna, and geology of her two homes in Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201c[Both countries share] a common history, which is why Venezuela was always a reference for me,\u201d she told Contemporary And Am\u00e9rica Latina<\/a> in a 2024 interview. \u201cI remember sitting with my parents and siblings during some vacations, watching the lights of Venezuela from Trinidad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Critics identified this geographical aspect of her work as early as the 1970s. In an exhibition catalog essay for Sculptures by Valerie Brathwaite<\/a> \u2014 the artist\u2019s first solo museum show, presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas in 1975 \u2014\u00a0Juan Calzadilla argues that by focusing on horizontality rather than verticality, Brathwaite \u201cgives sculpture a new \u2018aesthetic of the crawling,\u2019 eschewing tradition and placing \u2018the terrestrial\u2019 at the core of South American culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

This sense of horizontality carried through to many elements in her practice. Ranging from acrylic paint, concrete, MDF, plaster, clay, metals, and stuffed fabric beginning in the early 2000s, Brathwaite\u2019s materials of choice often rejected hierarchies of medium in sculpture. Similarly, her tendency to display works either directly on gallery floors or on low, planar platforms reaffirmed the objects\u2019 closeness to the earth rather than adherence to any particular academic or art historical lineage.<\/p>\n

\"\"Installation view of Valerie Brathwaite’s Where Have All The Flowers Gone? (2021) at Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York (photo Arturo Sanchez, courtesy Henrique Faria Fine Art)<\/p>\n

Though her work shares aesthetic similarities with the voluminous forms of Barbara Hepworth<\/a>, Jean Arp, and Louise Bourgeois<\/a>, the artist forged a naturalist sensibility that was entirely her own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Brathwaite\u2019s own words, she was fascinated with \u201cthe overwhelming beauty of mountains, rocks, stones, exotic plants, women\u2019s breasts and legs, male torsos, sunsets, and the marvelous bodies of animals,\u201d and saw sculpture as a way to express the sensuality of the natural world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The fluidity between the artist\u2019s interior desires and the exterior worlds occasionally bled into music, too. A self-described<\/a> \u201cSculptress & Dj,\u201d Brathwaite began developing what the Museo Reina Sof\u00eda describes<\/a> as \u201ca rich sound world shaped by an experimentation and the use of scratching that invoke the rhythms of jazz and freestyle\u201d in the 1990s.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Valerie in the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas in 1975 (photo Vladimir Sersa, courtesy Henrique Faria Fine Art)<\/p>\n

In the same 2024 feature in Contemporary And, writer Nohora Arrieta Fern\u00e1ndez identified the musical quality that extends across all of Brathwaite\u2019s work, describing its unceasing nature as akin to flowers blooming and volcanoes erupting.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there were one single word to describe her, it would be truth,\u201d Henrique Faria and Eugenia Sucre of the New York gallery Henrique Faria Fine Art, which represents Brathwaite, told Hyperallergic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cLet the music play,\u201d they continued. \u201cKeep dancing, even when there is no music, Valerie Marie.\u201d<\/p>\n

The artist\u2019s friends and family<\/a> held a memorial for Brathwaite in the East Cemetery in Caracas this afternoon, July 7.<\/p>\n