Unknown World

Author: Sofía Bassi

Title: Mundo Desconocido, ELC (Unknown World, [In Jail])

Date: 1970

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 31.5 × 39.4 inches

Location: Private collection

Rights: Sofía Bassi Foundation

Unknown World, ELC belongs to the prolific body of work that Sofía Bassi produced during her imprisonment between 1968 and 1973. Created in 1970, the painting exemplifies the introspective turn her visual language took during this period, when she redefined artistic creation as a form of inner alchemy and transmutation. The inscription ELC (En La Cárcel, or In Jail) marks the biographical specificity of this moment while also highlighting the metaphysical resonance of the landscape.

Rendered in saturated greens and shadowy blues, the composition presents a vast, imaginary topography populated by sharp spires, ambiguous architectures, and dense atmospheric layers. A lone, diminutive figure appears in the lower right quadrant, dwarfed by the monumental scale of the terrain—perhaps an allegory of exile, inner withdrawal, or spiritual seeking. Unlike Bassi’s pre-prison works, which often conveyed a sense of cosmic elevation and metaphysical openness, this painting leans toward a more enclosed, haunted register—marked by silence, desolation, and constrained transcendence.

The surrealist idiom remains central, yet here it is inflected by the psychic and emotional pressures of incarceration. Bassi’s otherworldly landscapes become less visionary in the ecstatic sense, and more archaeological—sites of excavation, memory, and inner reckoning. Unknown World shares with The Lady Who Walks Away (1970) a common symbolic language of isolation, inner transit, and metaphysical introspection. In both, a solitary figure traverses an expansive, surreal landscape—gesturing toward exile, transformation, and the alchemical reconfiguration of the self.