Tracing invisible histories through drawing, space and memory
Ana Bidart, Long Before the Walls, 2025. Installation view. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Delfina Foundation recently presented the first European solo exhibition by Mexico-based Uruguayan artist Ana Bidart, titled ‘Long Before the Walls’. Staged across the rooms of Delfina’s London house, the show formed a constellation of newly commissioned, site-specific installations and subtle interventions that explored the overlap between writing, drawing, and the temporal choreography of inhabited space.
With her characteristic playfulness and poetic precision, Bidart sculpted quiet disruptions across walls, corners, and surfaces—often working directly on-site. From oily gestures on plaster to the residue of motion and use, her works conjured the spectral presence of bodies and histories just beyond the frame. The exhibition’s title, ‘Long Before the Walls’, served as both an invocation and a proposition: a call to consider what preceded architecture, language, and historical narratives as we know them.
Bidart’s recent visit to Serra da Capivara National Park in Brazil—home to some of the oldest American rock art—further informed her approach. There, confronted with prehistoric traces etched into stone, she began to think more deeply about what drawing does and how mark-making can become an act of memory, survival, and communication across time.
At Delfina, this sensibility took shape as Notas sueltas (Loose Notes), a site-specific wall piece rendered in oil—a deliberate and fugitive residue. Throughout the house, Bidart’s interventions invited viewers to re-experience architecture not as a fixed structure but as a mutable, living archive. Fingerprints on a light switch, a worn handrail, the faint outline of an erased drawing—each gesture became a potential entry point into the layered story of the space itself.
Bidart’s practice dissolves the boundaries between disciplines: drawing becomes writing, writing becomes sculpture, and space becomes a page. Rather than presenting finished objects, ‘Long Before the Walls’ positioned the viewer within a slow choreography of discovery. One could walk through the house and find themselves tracing the artist’s steps—leaning in, pausing, questioning what was added and what was always already there.
Ana Bidart (b. 1985, Montevideo) is a visual artist based in the Yucatán Peninsula, working between Mexico and Uruguay. Her work has been shown across Latin America, the United States, and Europe, including at the National Museum of Visual Arts in Montevideo, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, and Galerie Perrotin in Paris.
In 2023, she was an artist-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, London, as part of the FAARA Conecta program in alliance with Fundación Ama Amoedo. Her other residencies include Pivô Pesquisa (São Paulo), Flora ars+natura (Bogotá), and Casa Wabi Foundation (Oaxaca).
She is the author of Un golpe de suerte (2023), a drawing book for children published in Mexico by Piedra Ediciones with support from Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo.
The exhibition will be on view from the 4th of April until the 25th of May 2025. For more information, please visit the Delfina Foundation.
