Leonilda González was born in rural Uruguay in the 1920s. There, she developed her drive to affect social change through printmaking as her main medium – xylography (wood cuts) in particular – believing that its replicable and accessible qualities would help her communicate with larger audiences. She co-founded the Club de Grabado de Montevideo, a graphic arts collective and school, part of el movimiento de la cultura independiente (“the independent culture movement”), a group of member-funded arts institutions that stepped in as alternatives to governmental cultural organisations.
González used the soft side of her knife to carefully remove layers of wood from her blocks, allowing her to achieve subtle tonal gradients, and employed typographical printers that enabled her and the Club de Grabado to produce original prints by the thousands. At the height of the independent culture movement, González embarked on the series Novias revolucionarias (Revolutionary Brides), which encapsulated both her signature tone – a combination of irony, sarcasm and anger – and her graphic mastery – high-contrast black-and-white renderings of Byzantine-inspired bodies and faces. Although these brides’ marital bliss is supposedly just beginning, González represents them as angry, protesting a system that seeks to “imprison” them. A few years later, the prints would be read as images of opposition to the brutal military dictatorship in Uruguay (1973-1985).
—Roxana Fabius
