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

Viaje espacial (Space Journey, 1969) shows an elongated figure moving through a dense, star-filled sky. The body stretches upward from a curved, vessel-like form that occupies the lower half of the composition. This structure, with its rough and irregular surface, supports the figure while also drifting through space. Around it, small planets and fragments float against a layered background of green and reddish tones.

Sofía Bassi painted this work while incarcerated in Acapulco. In her memoir, she recalls watching the first lunar landing on television from her cell and interprets it as a moment of contact with extraterrestrial life, a theme that runs throughout her work. She describes the scene as an ascent that continues beyond the moon. The form beneath the figure reads as a vehicle, a type of capsule that recurs in her paintings and is linked to travel across cosmic space. The painting was later taken from her cell by Vinton Long and exhibited at NASA’s Hall of Fame before entering the Smithsonian Institution.