Sin título (Untitled)

Through her still lifes, María Teresa "Teyé" Cuéllar (b. 1935) does not seek pictorial realism, but rather to reflect her emotions and interpretation of the personality of the most quotidian of objects. After studying art in her native Bogotá, Cuéllar traveled to Italy in 1956 and continued her training at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, returning three years later to Colombia to participate in her first exhibition at the Salon of Painters of Bogotá. Around 1974, Cuéllar began to collaborate in the illustrations of a series of books dedicated to Colombian and Spanish cuisine, edited by her husband the writer Antonio Montaña. "Teyé" then ventured into still lifes and images of flowers and fruits that she observed from her home in the mountains of Chía, a landscape that would influence a later stage of her creative career. Cuéllar feeds artistically on whatever she has at hand, using it as a pretext to paint. For her, the human figure is not colorful enough, while in vegetables she finds "light, color, forms, textures (...). They swell, they wrinkle, they are erotic as well as huge and sickly."