Valerie Brathwaite, the Trinidadian-born, Caracas-based artist whose undulating, organic sculptural forms reflected her love of the natural world, has died at the age of 87. The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires announced the news of her death on their Instagram page on Monday, July 6.
The museum, which presented a retrospective of the artist’s sculptures and drawings less than a year ago, described Brathwaite in the post as an “artist of extraordinary sensitivity, whose work was driven by her admiration for life and nature.”
Born in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1938, Brathwaite left her home country for the United Kingdom in the late 1950s, where she studied art and design at the Hornsey College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Her academic training later took her to the École des Beaux-Art in Paris, where she worked with the Russian and French cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine.
However, it was only after a visit to Caracas in 1969 that Brathwaite’s practice began to germinate into the intuitive, biomorphic forms for which she is known today. During this trip, the artist befriended sculptor Gego, also known as Gertrud Goldschmidt, who encouraged her to move there. She followed the fellow immigrant artist’s advice and moved to the Venezuelan capital within a year.
In Caracas she quickly became acquainted with artists, critics and curators, including Mercedes Pardo, Marta Traba, Lourdes Blanco and Miguel Arroyo. She began to develop a style irreducible to the movements of modernism and conceptual art around her, consisting of polychromatic drawings and sculptures. These works, which attracted early attention from the art world, combined existing organic forms or invented new ones, inspired by the flora, fauna and geology of her two homes in Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela.
“[Both countries share] a common history, and that is why Venezuela has always been a reference for me,” she said Contemporary and American Latina in a 2024 interview. “I remember on some holidays sitting with my parents and siblings and looking at the lights of Venezuela from Trinidad.”
Critics identified this geographical aspect of her work as early as the 1970s. In an exhibition catalog essay for Sculptures by Valerie Brathwaite – the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas in 1975 – Juan Calzadilla argues that by focusing on horizontal rather than vertical, Brathwaite ‘gives sculpture a new ‘aesthetic of the crawl’, eschewing tradition and placing ‘the earthly’ at the core of South American culture.
This sense of horizontality was reflected in many elements of her practice. Ranging from acrylic paint, concrete, MDF, plaster, clay, metals and filled fabrics from the early 2000s onwards, Brathwaite’s preferred materials often rejected the hierarchies of medium in sculpture. Likewise, her tendency to display works directly on gallery floors or on low, flat platforms affirmed the objects’ connection to the earth rather than adherence to a particular academic or art historical lineage.
Although her work bears aesthetic similarities to the voluminous forms of Barbara Hepworth, Jean Arp and Louise Bourgeois, the artist forged a naturalistic sensibility that was entirely her own.
In Brathwaite’s own words, she was fascinated by ‘the overwhelming beauty of mountains, rocks, stones, exotic plants, women’s breasts and legs, male torsos, sunsets and the beautiful bodies of animals’, and saw sculpture as a way to express the sensuality of the natural world.
The fluidity between the artist’s inner desires and the outside world was also occasionally reflected in the music. Brathwaite, who calls herself a “Sculptor and DJ,” began developing what the Museo Reina Sofía describes as “a rich sound world shaped by experimentation and the use of scratching that evokes the rhythms of jazz and freestyle” in the 1990s.
In the same 2024 movie in Contemporary Andwriter Nohora Arrieta Fernández identified the musical quality that extends throughout Brathwaite’s work, describing its ceaseless nature as akin to blooming flowers and erupting volcanoes.
“If there were one word to describe her, it would be the truth,” Henrique Faria and Eugenia Sucre of the New York gallery Henrique Faria Fine Art, which represents Brathwaite, told Hyperallergic.
“Let the music play,” they continued. “Keep dancing even when there is no music, Valerie Marie.”
Friends and family of the artist held a memorial for Brathwaite this afternoon, July 7, at the East Cemetery in Caracas.
