Sofía Bassi

Biography

Sofía Bassi was born in 1913 in Ciudad Camerino Mendoza, Veracruz (Mexico). She studied Philosophy at the UNAM. In 1964 she began to paint, thus developing an artistic career of late vocation. Although her personal style is linked to a specific aspect of surrealism, typical of artists related to the Mexican context as Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) or Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Sofía Bassi was not part of this group in official or institutional terms and is a largely unknown painter in the context of art history. She died in 1998 in Mexico City. Through a personal imaginary, full of hybrid beings, lost cities and fantastic creatures, her representations unfold a dreamlike universe that seems to distort time, generating her own narrative. Each painting, or each dream, is connected to a previous reverie: an interior landscape revealing that which remains both visible and hidden in the collective unconscious. In 1972, Jean Michel Cropsal defined her work as a “magical impression”. Magic reveals the fragility of reality; the intimate relationship of our daily experience with a hidden spiritual dimension.