Cross-Country: Colombian Art in the Collection of the Bank of the Republic

Cross-Country: Colombian Art in the Collection of the Bank of the Republic is staged at Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid from 20 February - 22 April 2018. Curated by Estrella de Diego, the exhibition features more than 100 pieces and focuses on recent Colombian artistic production, including work by Doris Salcedo, Alejandro Obregón and Beatriz González, as well as historical pieces dating back to the colonial era.

As such, the show attempts to reflect a sense of Colombian identity thorugh the collection's wide range of art spanning from the late 18th Century to the present day. The show is structured around three main themes: Anatomy and Botany, Travel Guide, and Invisible Cities.

In Anatomy and Botany, the mortal body becomes a body of desire - from colonial era  paintings of nuns’ corpses to the homosexual anatomies of Caballero Holguin. The violated  bodies of Alejandro Obregón are placed alongside Bernardo Salcedo's disabled figures, which in turn lead the viewer to Doris Salcedo’s metaphors in broken  geometries.

The second section, Travel Guide, is a historical dialogue about Colombian diversity: the  ‘native’ as evidenced in the work of Beatriz González and African heritage as depicted in the  practice of Ramón Torres Méndez and Liliana Angulo. 

The third and final section, Invisible Cities, focuses on binaries - urban vs rural, and scarcity  vs abundance – which Colombian photography has taken up with overwhelming accuracy –  from the work of Luis B. Ramos to that of Fernell Franco.  

 

Fernando Arias, close-up Mucha India, 2014