Violeta Franco e Helena Wong:performances de gênero e liberdade na arte moderna no Paraná (1950-1989)

Abstract

This thesis addresses the life and work of artists Violeta Franco (19322006) and Helena Wong (1938-1990), between the 1950s and 1980s, considering their productions from a feminist perspective, whereby female artists are considered as cultural producers. (POLLOCK, 2019. During the period in question, we had in Paraná the constitution of an art that broke with so-called “academic” values, in which artists moved fluidly between modern figurative and abstractionism, contributing to a new artistic movement, seeking to free itself from institutional systems and moral norms that do not recognize and/or value female participation in public life and the arts. The objective of this work was to understand how artists Violeta Franco and Helena Wong used used their pictorial productions to negotiate with dominant power regimes, performing the genre in different ways, in which these compositions functioned as practices of freedom, criticizing social frameworks and the canons of art history. To this end, the problems were observed of gender present in this time and space, the processes of subjectivation, the forms of action/performances present in the artists' compositions, as well as the questions and/or negotiations they made with this reality, occupying places previously restricted to male subjects. The analysis is anchored in the feminist perspective on the History of Art by Griselda Pollock (2019) and in the problematizations suggested by Michel Foucault (1979; 1985; 2004; 2010) when thinking about history in a genealogical way, valuing the experiences and processes of subjectivation in search of a more ethical and fulfilling life, developing what he calls the aesthetics of existence.