ANDANZAS
Jamie Bischof arrived in Guatemala in 1960. She exhibited her work for the first time at the Salón Acuña of the National School of Fine Arts in 1970 and soon became part of the artistic scene of the moment.
From 1970 to 1984 she painted black-and-white and gray abstractions on canvases whose forms were already a kind of environmental assemblage. She also created sculptures in hand-bent aluminum over wooden structures. Her works were treasured by many friends of art who valued the freshness of her visual language. She was one of the few women raising her voice to propose a visual grammar rooted in a sensitive interior world—one enriched by solid education and an avid hunger for reading.
In 2007, after nearly 25 years of silence, she decided to return to her andanzas—her wanderings—and, filled with creative strength, her output has not diminished since. She has held annual exhibitions and consistently participated in group shows. For two decades we have enjoyed her fluid and diverse sculptural production, composed mainly of aluminum pieces, though she also created a series in wood and another in polyurethane tubing.
Through countless hours in her studio, she has gradually calmed an untamed and tireless imagination, guiding her forms into the material. She has always known that each work proposes a limit that can only be surpassed by the next challenge. The forcefulness of her pieces has imposed itself with the assurance of an irrefutable certainty, and she has often remarked that she completely visualizes a work before making it.
Her sculptures reveal a geometry of right angles intentionally displaced, where construction and rupture, composition and decomposition, the measured and the unmeasured, the conscious and the unconscious converge. Jamie has said more than once: “I am in love with aluminum because I feel it does something other media do not—it invites you in… we enter it when our image appears.” This metal, lacking color and reflecting its surroundings, projects the totality of color and absorbs whoever looks at it.
Much like aluminum, her personality welcomes us. Her warmth as a woman, wife, mother, artist, and friend fills those of us fortunate enough to know her. Her elegance has always been marked by restraint, for with little she has always said so much.
s. herrera u.
January 2024