Colombian Contemporary Art, Once You Get Past Botero

Fernando Botero gave the world an instantly readable idea of Colombian art: volume, humour, a plump cat in bronze on a public square. He was a genuinely major figure, and his donations built two of the country's most visited museum collections. He is also, for most visitors, where the conversation begins and ends — which is a shame, because the art being made in Colombia over the past forty years is among the most serious and formally inventive in the Americas.

It is also, frequently, art about memory. A country that lived through decades of internal armed conflict produced a generation of artists who had to find forms for absence: how do you make an object about people who are not there? The answers they arrived at have travelled far beyond Colombia.

Here is a short map for a traveller who wants more than a bronze cat.

The generation that reset the terms

Doris Salcedo, born in Bogotá in 1958, works with furniture, concrete, rose petals, human hair and the architecture of buildings themselves. In 2007 she cut a fissure into the floor of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in London — a work about exclusion that could not be un-made; the scar is still visible. In 2018 she completed Fragmentos in Bogotá, described as a counter-monument: thirty-seven tonnes of firearms surrendered under the peace agreement were melted down and hammered into floor tiles by women who had survived sexual violence during the conflict. Visitors walk on the result. There is no statue, no hero, no pedestal.

Óscar Muñoz, born in Popayán in 1951 and based in Cali, spent a career on the question of how images disappear. He has drawn portraits in water on hot pavement, made photographs that surface on steel discs only when you breathe on them, and let charcoal images form and dissolve on water in shallow basins. He received the Hasselblad Award in 2018, and he also founded Lugar a Dudas in Cali, an independent art space that has shaped a whole generation of Colombian artists.

Beatriz González, born in Bucaramanga and painting since the 1960s, took images from newspapers and turned them into flat, bright, deceptively cheerful compositions. Her most devastating work is not in a museum: in Bogotá's Central Cemetery she covered thousands of empty burial niches with prints of anonymous figures carrying bodies.

Earth, water and the territory as material

A younger current works less with objects than with land itself.

Delcy Morelos, born in Tierralta in 1967, fills entire rooms with earth. Her installation Earthly Paradise at the 2022 Venice Biennale was a labyrinth of soil mixed with hay, cassava flour, cacao, cinnamon and cloves — you smelled it before you understood it, and the work drew explicitly on Andean and Amazonian ways of thinking about the ground as ancestor rather than resource.

Carolina Caycedo has built a long-running body of work about rivers and the dams built across them, including research alongside communities of the upper Magdalena affected by the El Quimbo hydroelectric project in Huila — the same river valley described elsewhere in this Journal. It is a useful reminder that contemporary art in Colombia is often made in places nobody would call an art capital.

Where to actually see it

• Bogotá. The Museo de Arte Moderno (MAMBO), the Banco de la República's art collections in La Candelaria, and Fragmentos itself. The ARTBO fair each October turns the city into a temporary art capital, and the independent spaces are where the interesting arguments happen.
• Medellín. The Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, in a converted steelworks in Ciudad del Río, and the Museo de Antioquia facing Botero's sculpture-filled plaza — the past and present of the city in two buildings.
• Cali. Museo La Tertulia, one of the oldest modern art museums in the country, plus the independent scene around Lugar a Dudas.
• Nationally. The Salón Nacional de Artistas, running since 1940, moves between cities and remains the best single snapshot of what Colombian artists are doing now.

The street counts too

Bogotá has one of the most developed street-art cultures in Latin America, and it exists in its current form partly because of a tragedy: the police killing of a teenage graffiti writer in 2011 forced a public reckoning and, eventually, a policy shift toward tolerated and commissioned mural work. Today whole facades in La Candelaria and around Distrito Graffiti carry large-scale work by Colombian and international painters. Walking tours led by local artists exist in most large cities and are, in general, a better introduction than any wall text.

Huila's own deep tradition

None of this began in the twentieth century. In the far south of Huila, the San Agustín Archaeological Park — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995 — holds hundreds of monumental stone figures carved by a northern Andean culture that flourished roughly between the first and eighth centuries. They are the largest group of megalithic sculptures predating the Spanish arrival anywhere in South America, and they sit in green hills a few hours' drive from the valley. Whatever Colombian sculpture is, it did not start with bronze.

Huila's contribution to the country's culture also runs through language: José Eustasio Rivera, born in Rivera in 1888, wrote La Vorágine, one of the founding novels of Latin American literature, published in 1924.

The valley and what will be built in it

Phoenix Oasis will open on 30 June 2028 on 30 hectares near Rivera, in a department whose visual culture is older than the country and still very much alive. The bungalows planned for the estate are designed in wood, guadua and volcanic stone — regional materials, made by regional hands — and that is a form of cultural continuity before it is an aesthetic choice.

Nothing about the centre is finished yet. What is already here is the culture around it, which any future guest will be able to go and see for herself, from a cathedral of carved stone in the south of Huila to a floor of melted weapons in Bogotá.

More on the region in the Journal, and on the future stays on the retreats page.