Flashes from Colombia

Eclipse (2015) by Ana Maria Zuluaga Amaya

In little more than five hundred years, we have absorbed that kind of culture that took thousands of years to emerge in Old Europe. Let us remember that in our part of America mixed races began to appear shortly after the discovery of America in 1492, and in the following expeditions to the New World by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci. We ended up by adopting the name of Colombia in memory of the Genoese navigator. We are heirs of the Maya, Aztec and Chibcha indigenous peoples. Nowadays, the natives are mostly mestizos descended from the Spanish immigrants who refused to go back to Europe and finally gained independence, seduced by the luxuriant nature found in the new world, its rich flora and fauna that fascinated even Humboldt.

Lightness (2015) by Laura Vasquez Moreno

We adopted Spain’s language and religion, as well as the traditions of the Mediterranean peoples, who in turn had been influenced by the Moors, Jewish, Greeks, and Romans. To further mix the races, there was the arrival of the black slaves from Africa in the 17th and 18th century, who mainly settled along the coasts of our two oceans. Their cheerfulness and pain, their myths and their homesickness were merged together with the newcomers and the indigenous peoples who survived the invasion.

Memory-Projector (2015) by Nathalia Gomez Gomez

A similar process occurred in art. During the 20th century, while European industrial development gradually changed society and created the premises for the emergence of art avant-gardes in modern life, Colombia moved faster into modernity, though it was not completely rooted in everyday life. Its two main points of reference were Central Europe, for the above-mentioned reasons, and English culture, because of Colombia’s proximity to the United States. Work organization, industrialization and education systems were reformed following either of these two models.

Microcosms (2015) by Carlos Mario Velez Monsalve

All throughout the 20th century, Colombian art was deeply influenced by several traditional art movements, yet locally reinterpreted. The Impressionism, for instance, reached Colombian art schools only many years later; concepts like expressionism and abstraction, which were typical of Germany after the World War I, or the theories of Vasilij Kandinskij, Paul Klee and the Bauhaus, came relatively late to Colombian art and architecture. Pop Art greatly affected the Colombian art in the 1980s and 1990s, long after Warhol and his contemporaries broke the art scene.

Untitled (2015) by Lina Paola Prieto Munoz (J&L Constructores)

This diversity, these Colombian genes, this variety of tropical climates, and our own and someone else’s stories have enriched all forms of Colombian creativity; its cultural hybrids, its many ways of feeling and perceiving. No surprise. We are fully aware that this exuberant environment can produce pieces with strong contrasts. Amazing contrasts, which range from the most wonderful to the most painful ones. Ours is a society of contrasts.

Peace (2015) by Raul Cristancho

There’s no gainsaying the richness of Latin artists’ creativity and their unmistakable imagination; nor can we expect Latin American people to insist on exoticism, as it happened in Africa a century ago. What matters is that looking at these stories, compressed in five centuries and presented by so many perspectives, there will be – as in this exhibition – many reactions, a personal attitude, as well as broader point of views and possibilities. It is also a way to redeem the individual by valuing differences and recognizing the others both in their specificity and personal creativity.