Unfinished and Other permanences: Conderations About an X by Carmela Grosse

Abstract

This article proposes to present the unfinished as a significant element of the work An X by Carmela Gross. In this sense, the text offers examples and reflections about what characterizes a finished or unfinished work of art throughout the history of art, highlighting the reframing of the issue in the contemporary context, especially from the 1960s/70s onwards. It is argued that the incompleteness of Gross's proposal reverberates political and cultural aspects of the periods in which it occurred, that is, 1968/69 (peak of the military dictatorship in Brazil), when the work was designed, and 2018, when it was exposed, unfinished, in the exhibition AI-5 50 years: still hasn’t ended yet (Tomie Ohtake Institute, São Paulo). Such an argument is developed through the approximation between An X and a portrait that the American painter Alice Neel did not finish due to the summoning of her model to the Vietnam War. Neel's painting, in its incomplete state, represents lives interrupted by conflict; in the same way that Gross's unfinished proposal invokes the unknown contingent of works that could not exist due to the persistent and repetitive repressions of artistic creation in Brazil.