Eugenio Viola

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  print March 2023

  Alexandra Gelis and Carlos Martiel

  “Gente de color” (People of Color), a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Alexandra Gelis and Carlos Martiel, was named after a performance by the latter. As applied to the show as a whole, the phrase functioned as a bitter metaphor for the contradictions of the Caribbean, a region rife with exploitation, inequality, and mass tourism, but also as a description of the creative hybridity produced by the continual mixing of peoples, traditions, and cultures. The Toronto-based, Colombian Venezuelan Gelis combines various media and interactive technologies to investigate specific Latin American

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  print February 2023

  Clemencia Echeverri

  Since the mid-1990s, Clemencia Echeverri has addressed a range of sociopolitical conditions plaguing Colombia in complex video installations. Her most recent effort, Deserere, 2022, the result of two years of work, responds to the 2004 Bahía Portete massacre, in which paramilitaries assassinated twelve people, including four women, and “disappeared” two girls in a deadly effort to gain control over the local port. The victims were social activists from the Indigenous Wayuu population who were attempting to protect the land their people have long inhabited. Roughly four hundred families were also

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  print January 2023

  Oscar Murillo

  Oscar Murillo’s exhibition “A Storm Is Blowing from Paradise” took its evocative title from the ninth of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). The show’s point of departure was Frequencies, 2013–, displayed alongside an array of new works especially conceived for this exhibition. Frequencies is a colossal work in progress, ongoing for nearly a decade now, in which Murillo and his collaborators visit schools around the world and affix blank canvases to the desks of pupils. Ranging in age from ten to sixteen, the students are prompted to express themselves freely on these

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  picks December 05, 2022

  Anna Maria Maiolino

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  print December 2022

  María Berrío

  María Berrío’s dreamlike compositions render imaginary worlds at the intersection of myth, history, folklore, and personal experience. Her evocative scenes are populated by tragic heroines or “embodied ideals of femininity,” as she calls them, who inhabit rarefied and timeless space, limned through an unusual technique: the skillful alternation of watercolors on layers of collage created from Japanese paper. This beautiful world is also a heartbreaking one, vaguely referring to the political and social upheavals that victimize the weakest and most marginalized social classes.

  Berrío’s exhibition

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  print September 2022

  María Teresa Hincapié

  “Si este fuera un principio de infinito” (If This Were a Beginning of Infinity) is the first retrospective devoted to the work of María Teresa Hincapié (1954–2008), a pioneer of performance art in Colombia. Curated by Claudia Segura and Emiliano Valdés, the exhibition was the result of a collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, to which it will travel this fall. In Hincapié’s work, the cadenced repetition of everyday gestures and actions and the deployment of an expanded temporality were strategies through which she transformed the commonplace into highly symbolic acts.

  At

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  print January/February 2021

  Beatriz González

  After earlier presentations at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, this retrospective—the most comprehensive showing to date of the work of Beatriz González, one of the most influential living Colombian artists— finally arrived at the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia in Bogotá. From the beginning, González (born in 1932 in Bucaramanga) has, driven by a radical eclecticism, undertaken a personal exploration of pictorial languages. Her reinterpretation of preexisting images is the subtle common thread that unifies her entire production. She has always been an omnivorous

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  print July/August 2020

  Liliana Sánchez and Santiago Díaz Escamilla

  Viewers were greeted by Díaz Escamilla’s Clarão. That from Which

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  print April 2020

  Renato Leotta

  Renato Leotta’s recent research focuses on the slow, meticulous observation of the landscape, which the artist investigates through photography, sculpture, installation, and video. Leotta generates a personal emotional geography populated by traces and fragments of reality that intertwine references to mythology and literature with autobiographical experience. Like an archaeologist of the present, he identifies and selects elements that weave together notions of time and space, suggesting an ambiguous relationship between real and ideal settings. For example, in Giardino (Garden), 2018, the

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  print March 2019

  Wilson Díaz and Oscar Murillo

  The book Parque Industrial (Industrial Park, 1933) by Brazilian writer Patrícia Galvão—better known as Pagu (1910–1962)—is considered the first “proletarian novel” in Latin American literature. It confronts uncomfortable subjects tied to the oppression and exploitation of the working class, especially women, and provided the evocative trail—or, better, the metatext—for Wilson Díaz and Oscar Murillo’s intriguing exhibition, “Paradoxon Spirituale” (Spiritual Paradox). While they have different sensibilities and poetics, and are from different generations—Díaz was born in 1963, Murillo twenty-three

• print January 2019

  Carlos Garaicoa

  In the 1990s, Carlos Garaicoa became known for his careful studies of his hometown of Havana. His work since, whether in photography, performance, drawing, sculpture, installation, text, or video, has been inhabited by the city and its ruins, its shattered dreams turned to dust and piles of rubble. Interweaving art, city planning, and architecture, he examines the ways in which its urban spaces preserve memories of the past and are charged with political, documentary, and social content. Just as Havana previously constituted an inescapable point of departure for the artist’s investigation of

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  picks April 05, 2018

  Lisa Reihana

  “Emissaries,” Lisa Reihana’s New Zealand pavilion at the Fifty-Seventh Venice Biennale, is a poetic, provocative exhibition centered on the clash between two cultures. Its monumental centerpiece, in Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015–17, is a mesmerizing panorama of a video installation that marshals film, digital tableau vivant, and ethnographic documentary to question stories authored by the country’s white colonizers. The work is inspired by Les sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, 1804–1805, better known as Captain Cook’s Voyages: a French Neoclassical wallpaper designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet that