Tapir-Hereditariedade (Tapir-Inheritance)

Educated in Germany and in Paris, Bess worked as a magazine illustrator in Venezuela before settling in Brazil. Her etchings characteristically appropriate the animal body and its biological functions, imagining in them the existence of human community. In some of Bess's etchings, animal forms take on the regularity and radial symmetry of flowers.  Elsewhere, as in Tapir-Hereditariedade, they are arranged within grids in ways that suggest the expression of scientific principles. Seen from the perspective of animal reproductive behavior, her artwork appears to reference patterns of phylogenesis, or the evolutionary development of forms.