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.
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| Fernando Arias, close-up Mucha India, 2014 |