The Brooklyn Rail

In the wake of the feminist art movement’s emergence during the 1960s and early 1970s, the Italian-Venezuelan artist Tecla Tofano addressed the uneasy position of women working within—or against—a history that systematically reinforced patriarchal perspectives with La mujer en la historia (Women in History) (1975). This glazed ceramic is molded into the shape of a book with the carved title “History of Men,” the gender-specificity accentuated by a scratchy underline. A woman with a blank featureless face typical of Tofano’s depictions of women is sandwiched uncomfortably between the covers. La mujer en la historia plays, on allegorical and linguistic registers, with the experience of inhabiting a male-dominated history, here visualized in terms of both awkward interjection and immobilizing constraint. Tofano's artist signature, her stamped initials, claims the space reserved for the name of a book’s author. With concise elegance, this gesture subverts the emblematic impenetrability of history for women.

Borrowing its title from the opening lines of one of Tofano’s poems, This Body of Mine at James Cohan Gallery brings together over forty works culled from numerous series, some dating back sixty years. It is co-curated by Gabriela Rangel and Audrée Anid with a focus on Tofano’s interest in “the body as a tactical space of confrontation,” an emphasis that opens creative territory via and for the artist’s female subjectivity. In this inaugural solo exhibition in the United States, the title acquires a secondary significance. The exhibition offers a focused showcase of the artist’s extensive body of work, a legacy forged from decades as a studio potter, sculptor, and writer.

Tecla Tofano began as a ceramicist, creating utilitarian pieces marked by robust and raw facture. She was part of a generation of artists, mainly women, who studied ceramics with Miguel Arroyo—others included Christina Merchán, Reina Herrera, and Maria Luisa Tovar. Tofano’s works, ranging from bowls to ashtrays and vases, bore distinctively coarse incisions, forceful sgraffitos, splits in the clay, and uneven textures beneath glazed surfaces. These distinctive finishes carry with them a certain sobriety that eschews delicate or fragile forms, focusing instead on the bold and substantive.

In 1964, Tofano began to explore hand-molded figurative objects crafted from mud and clay. Beneath their lush surfaces, washes of color, and technical inventiveness lies a dark humor that seamlessly melds the playful with satirical critique. Consider her disembodied tongues, such as Lengua totem (Totem Tongue) (1966), with a ribbed silhouette that curves sinuously, accented by yellow marigolds. These works are charged with the visceral weight of silencing, violent or otherwise. Folded in Tofano's pieces is a sensitive meditation of the grotesque and abject: in the artist’s words, "if not pleasant to the gaze, if distasteful some of the time, it is because what I’m seeking to express is not pretty.”¹ Her commitment to figuration, the monstrous, and the affective over aesthetic conformity distinguished her from many of her contemporaries, as abstraction largely held sway in the mid-century art scene of Caracas.

Phallic glazed ceramics such as Y poblaron al mundo (And They Populated the World) (1973) and Solidaridad (Solidarity) (1973), part of the series “Esa munda macha” (That Male Chauvinist World), explore the conditioning of a patriarchal worldview. Certainly, Tofano's ceramics fall loosely—but not exclusively—into a larger feminist art practice. Cinturón con cartera (Belt with purse) (1971) marks the Pop inflection of her series “Los accesorios” (The Accessories), which featured handbags, shoes, and other items of consumer culture traditionally coded as “feminine.” On display as well is Bacalao al Limón (Cod with Lemon) (1973) from one of Tofano’s most well-known exhibitions “Lo que comen los que comen” (What Those Who Eat Eat). Originally part of a lavish feast of ceramic treats for upperclass diners, the series addresses the social inequality and hunger eclipsed by the ostensible and celebrated prosperity of Venezuela’s petroculture.

Alongside her ceramics, the exhibition unveils a rarely seen aspect of Tofano's art: her 1972 series “Evas al desnudo” (Naked Eves). These drawings, rich in symbolism and allegory, portray a nude Eve in diverse scenarios. Unlike the biblical Eve, who covered herself after partaking in the forbidden fruit, Tofano's Eve remains exposed and vulnerable, stripped of the comforting and concealing veil of clothing. A band wraps around her blank face, suggesting being gagged or blindfolded, silenced or blinded. One of the most explicit biblical references, Así empezó todo (Thus it all began) (1972), rethinks the pivotal moment between Eve, the snake, and the forbidden fruit. In this rendition of the familiar archetype, Eve is not succumbing to the snake’s temptation, but assuming the role of a temptress (itself a commonly vilified female archetype) by directing the coiled snake towards the fruit. The series delves further into traditional patriarchal narratives, exploring the repercussions of disobedience within such frameworks. In Los reproduce (She Reproduces Them) (1972), Eve mirrors the stance of the titan Atlas of Greek mythology, kneeling under the weight of an egg hatching a young boy. As Atlas was punished by Zeus with bearing the heavens, Eve was burdened with pain in childbirth.

Far from being dictated solely by gender, the radicalism of Tofano's art moves beyond the broader normative structures she subverts. It’s to this effect that This Body of Mine rightly gestures. While themes of heritage, gender violence, solidarity, and agency loom large across the works in This Body of Mine, the curators rightfully refrain from reducing this body of work to a singular thesis. Her ceramics, intentionally arranged not chronologically or serially but in complementary groupings, allow converging and divergent threads to unravel. Here Tofano’s oeuvre appears as cumulative and recursive, a curatorial logic that brings us closer to her worldview than a simpler chronological presentation of this corpus could.

Endnotes

1. De la silla a la cápsula, catalogue text. (Caracas: Sala Mendoza, 1969).