Bodies of Light and Matter: A Look at the Essence of Modern Colombian Art.

Casa Zirio Gallery opens its doors to a unique experience with the exhibition “Bodies of Light and Matter: A Look at the Essence of Modern Colombian Art,” a collective show that brings together some of the greatest masters of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The curatorial axis centers on the body, understood not only as a physical presence but also as a symbolic space. Each work here is a body: of light, when it radiates spirituality and transcendence; and of matter, when it evokes the earthly, the sensitive, the tangible. This duality runs through the history of modern Colombian art and manifests itself through diverse languages, materials, and sensibilities.

Featuring works by artists such as Olga de Amaral, Fernando Botero, Alejandro Obregón, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Manuel Hernández, Enrique Grau, Luis Caballero, David Manzur, Álvaro Barrios, Santiago Cárdenas, Hugo Zapata, and Marlene Hoffmann, the exhibition celebrates the richness and plurality of artistic modernity in Colombia. Textiles, oils, charcoals, and stone sculptures invite us to contemplate art not merely as an aesthetic event, but as a living body that radiates history, thought, and sensibility.

“Each work is both a corporeal and symbolic body that holds within it the sensitive memory of the country — a way of inhabiting the world through art,” notes the curatorial text.

As a whole, Bodies of Light and Matter stands as both a tribute to the masters who have shaped the course of Colombian art and an invitation to return to the essential: to recognize in light and in matter the traces of the human.