Bernardo Salcedo’s work challenges conventional logic through a conceptual language that questions perception, value, and identity. Widely regarded as a pioneer of conceptual art in Colombia, Salcedo reconfigures everyday objects and found fragments, stripping them of their original function to imbue them with new meanings.
Series such as White Boxes and White Objects exemplify a practice shaped by irony, absurdity, and a critical engagement with social and political structures. Through assemblage and visual intervention, his work constructs a universe of disjointed signs that invites viewers to look beyond the obvious and confront the fractures of meaning.
Text and Curatorship: Viviana Mejía
Ever Astudillo’s (1948–2015) work emerged during a pivotal moment in Colombian art when drawing became established as an autonomous language for reflecting on the urban experience. Trained in Cali during the 1970s, his practice was shaped alongside a generation of artists—including Óscar Muñoz, Fernell Franco, Luis Ospina, Carlos Mayolo, and Pedro Alcántara—who, through film, photography, literature, and the visual arts, developed a distinctive perspective on everyday life and the city’s social transformations.
This exhibition brings together a selection of works that explores two central themes in Astudillo’s practice: the city and the male body. Throughout the exhibition, a latent tension emerges, as each drawing seems to capture the moment just before an imminent event. The city appears as a generic yet ambiguous atmosphere, where darkening skies evoke the fading light of somber afternoons, defining the silhouettes of faceless men.
In parallel, the body is presented not as an individual subject but as a fragment that suggests vulnerability and desire. His erotic drawings of the male figure offer a restrained exploration of intimacy, where eroticism is constructed according to the same logic as the city itself—through shadows, silences, and incomplete gestures.
Astudillo’s drawings reveal an observation that is both constant and subtle, weaving together the intimate and the urban without hierarchy, and ultimately expressing an experience that is profoundly personal and deeply rooted in its context.
Text and Curated by: Viviana Mejía
