Prior to her 1961 visit to Bolivia, María Luisa Pacheco began to experiment with abstract expressionism and art informel, and Composition is among her earliest forays into non-representational painting. A series of flattened, angular planes, largely vertical in orientation, are punctuated by sharp, linear elements and the occasional burst of gestural activity. She dabbed and scraped paint across the canvas producing a variety of textures with an earthen palette dominated by white, black, and ochre. The forms are at once architectonic and terrestrial with linear elements reminiscent of fissures and cracks extending from one form to the next. Although Pacheco’s title Composición emphasizes the manipulation of space as her primary concern, she later acknowledged the influence of the Andean landscape and its indigenous cultures as inspiration for the colors, structures, and textures of her mature works. Like the abstract expressionists, who frequently looked to Native American as well as pre-Columbian motifs as inspiration for their works, Pacheco, too, sought formal qualities in the art and architecture of ancient Bolivia. She largely avoided specific references to architecture or totemic forms but drew broader inferences to the topography and colors of the landscape and the material culture of the indigenous population. This ancestralism would have a tremendous impact on Bolivian art in the 1970s and Pacheco, though working from the United States, would be a leading figure in the abstraction of that period. Born in La Paz, Bolivia to architect Julio Mariaca Pando and Teresa Dietrich Zalles, María Luisa Pacheco, née María Luisa Dietrich Zalles, began her artistic education in 1934 at the Acadamia de Bellas Artes, under Jorge de la Reza and Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas. Rojas was the chief proponent of indiginismo in Bolivia and Pacheco followed his example, painting images of the indigenous population. In 1948 she joined the newspaper La Razón for two years as an illustrator and then decided to take up painting in earnest, traveling to Spain in 1951 on a fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She attended classes at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and studied privately with artist David Vásquez Díaz. Upon her return to Bolivia in 1953, Pacheco joined the faculty of the Academia de Bellas Artes and helped found the group Ocho Contemporáneos. She began to exhibit regularly thereafter, including at the III Bienal de São Paulo in 1955. In 1956 she relocated to New York City and began exhibiting at Galería Sudamericana. The following year José Gómez Sicre invited her to exhibit at the Visual Arts Section of the OAS. Her work at the time demonstrated the strong influence of Cuban Wifredo Lam but, living in New York City in the heyday of abstract expressionism, she gradually moved away from representational imagery. After a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1958 and a brief return to Bolivia in 1961, Pacheco looked to the “gigantic landscape and the ancient art of Bolivia.” She remained in the United States for the rest of her career, showing at the Lee Ault and Company Gallery from 1971 until its close in 1980. In 1982 Pacheco died from a cerebral tumor.