Space Journey

Author: Sofía Bassi

Title: Viaje espacial (Space Journey)

Date: 1969

Material: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 23 × 19 inches

Location: Gift of the artist, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

Rights: Sofía Bassi Foundation

Painted while Bassi was incarcerated in 1969, Viaje espacial (Space Journey) depicts a haunting journey through cosmic space, where an elongated, ghostlike figure traverses the stars aboard a surreal, pod-like vessel. Rendered in spectral greens and crimson tones, the painting evokes an atmosphere of metaphysical weightlessness, where the boundary between the material and the spiritual dissolves. Floating among distant planets and clouds of astral mist, the craft suggests not only a space vehicle, but a symbolic vehicle of the soul—an image that recurs throughout Bassi’s work as a metaphor for transcendence.

In her memoir, Bassi recalls how the work was inspired by the televised images of the first man landing on the moon. Her painting, she explains, was meant to convey three stylized human figures ascending into the infinite—"not to the moon," she wrote, "but beyond it." She believed that one day, humanity would learn to move through the cosmos propelled not by machines, but by the force of its own spiritual energy. This metaphysical vision captivated NASA engineer Vinton Long, who personally retrieved the painting from Bassi’s prison cell in Acapulco and arranged for its exhibition at NASA’s Hall of Fame. Later transferred to the Smithsonian, the painting stands as a powerful testament to the possibility of inner freedom and cosmic imagination—even from within the confines of a prison.