Galería Sin título & Gaston Ugalde.

Galería Sin título & Gaston Ugalde.

It’s a pleasure to announce the inaugural opening of Galería Sin Titulo (Untitled Gallery) which opened its doors last week in Bogota. The special thing about Galería Sin Titulo is the fact that it is planned to be an exclusively photography dedicated gallery, the second one in Bogotá, the other one being Galeria MU. It’s noteworthy to add that two photography galleries is a very small number for a city that praises itself as the “latin-american athens” and that was named one of the future capitals of art by the NY times earlier this year.

The inaugural show featured 2002 Konex award recipient Bolivian artist Gastón Ugalde. (Also known as “the Andean Warhol.”)
Ugalde’s work can be described as deeply spiritual or ethereal; one can sense a deep connection rooting the artist to his own geographic and social context which manifests its self through the abundance of borderline iconic Latin-American-Andean-and Bolivian symbols and elements. All of this with the majestuous Uyuni salt desert background. The work is also very pleasing from an esthetic point of view, maybe even too esthetic, it’s easy to oversee the subtle cultural and spiritual references due to the beauty of the Bolivian landscapes intervened with such colorful and lively elements.

 

 

 

 

 

 But it’s interesting to see contemporary photography that can easily be hung on the living room wall by its sheer pictorialist-ic merit.

During the event i had the chance to speak with the galleries owner Carlos Gardeazabal and chief curator Tom Quintero, who were happy to tell about galleries intentions to become an open and much necessary space to showcase the new approaches of Colombian and Latin American photography. i was also fortunate enough to peep into the selected artist’s they will be showing and representing in the near future exhibitions and I’m  glad to see they have a defined vision of the type and quality of the art they will hold.

Bogota Fotografica 2013 (1)

Bogota Fotografica 2013 (1)

During the months of May and July Bogota held international photography festival Bogota Fotografica. This edition of the festival included a set of conferences with international artist and curators, as well as workshops and more than 20 independent exhibitions featuring the work of more than 100 artists focusing on contemporary landscape photography.

The following few articles will revolve around some of the exhibitions and artists who I got to see during these past weeks as part of Bogota Fotografica 2013.
MAV UJTL.
Museo de Artes Visuales featured the work of Chinese artist Cui XiuWen, this was by far the exhibition I liked the least -from a photographic standpoint.- the body of work shown is entitled Existential emptiness and revolved around the idea of being a woman in contemporary China. The photos are panoramic black and white metaphorical tableau landscapes that at first (and far) glance look like very Zen-like landscapes, but when looked at from a closer distance  they appeared to be poorly executed and printed.

Biblioteca Nacional.
Colombian artist Santiago Harker La otra Orilla. A conceptual series that advocates against documental objectivity in photography. Harker makes a case for photography as a subjective and distortive treatment of reality. The work is very pictorial and appealing with very saturated prints of multiple and parallel “realities” within the frame, the work distances itself from Harker previous more documental works towards a more conceptual and pictoric world.

Despite being a world wide renowned artist I had never seen the work of Italian Franco Fontana and it was my personal favorite discovery from all the artists I saw in Bogota Forografica. Franco Fontana makes beautiful urban landscape photographs in a very minimalistic way. The work is colorful and geometrical, its impossible not to be reminded of the work of Mondrian but, it also made me think about Hopper. Very pictorial, esthetically solid and unpretentious work.

 

Assaf Evron Exhibited a very abstract series entitled Cars. An interesting approach of space and human realtionships depicting the prints of human interaction with the surrounding landscape. The work also has a meta-photographic aspect to it  challenging the photograph as a symbolic print.

Emerging art photography in Colombia.

During the last few weeks Galeria Mu and photography school Zona Cinco, celebrating the gallery’s second anniversary, organized a set of fine art photography conferences featuring a few distinguished upcoming artists who have been making interesting work for the past years in the very narrow and relatively “new” context of Colombian fine art photography. It was a bold and great initiative with intentions of approaching a wider audience and familiarizing them with the current state of contemporary photographic art practices in the Colombian context. The event was relatively successful, the attendance was higher than expected and the public seemed to be eager about the subject.  The conferences were mainly personal retrospectives by the Authors talking about their background, experience, approach and showcasing their work. Sadly the discussions that followed the individual conferences were frivolous and trivial at the most. I do not blame this on the artists or the organizers, I believe it has more to do with the little previous exposure and understanding the audience had of the subject matter as most of the public seemed more interested with the technical details and other superficial aspects of the photographs, instead of inquiring about the real substance of the art work. It’s only natural for this to happen in a context where art photography is a relatively new and unfamiliar concept to the general public. I also believe that this kind of events will grow in number and also in quality in the near future with the further democratization of information and the inclusion of new art venues that help make art more accessible to everyone.

I would like to feature three of the artists who I thought had some of the strongest and interesting works.

Juanita Carrasco
Juanita’s work revolves around accumulated memory through the deconstruction and latter reconfiguration of urban landscape through both digital and plastic means. Her work challenges the conventions of “normal” format within photographic presentation often making asymmetric, polygonal and three-dimensional pieces that borderline between prints and installation.

Javier Venegas.
Javier is a very young artist who works with a diverse number of subjects and media. The work that really caught my attention was an installation piece entitled Postmodern Portrait. The piece explores the digital dematerialization of photographic representation as well as the sociological conventions of social and familiar photography in the last decades in Colombia. It reflects on how digital display systems have become memory vessels replacing material photography and frames.

Diana Beltrán.
Diana’s work “Technological Transformation” Is both strongly conceptual and quite poetic. The work revolves around identity transfigurations through technology. How mass media and technology change our perceptions and relations in both life and identity.

Sandy Skoglund.

Sandy Skoglund.

American artist Sandy Skoglund may be one of todays most visually stunning tableau photographers. Her color-drenched images are reminiscent of artist such as Magritte, Dali and even Jeff Koons or film maker David Lynch, but these incredibly surreal prints are not more than just a mean to a much richer aspect of the work. 

With a background in painting and sculpture Skoglund does not define herself as a photographer; photography does play a key aspect of her work but not the main and central one. She paints and sculpts all elements in her sets and then photographs them, the final outcome is not just the photographic print but also the three-dimensional installation, both works presented in the same hierarchic level.

 The artist always felt bored by direct classic photography and felt fascinated with the anti esthetic the work of Ed Ruscha. What she basically values in photographic creation is the calculability and manipulability of the end product, also the contradiction between being and seeming, reality and artificiality. Although Skoglund’s oeuvre appears to be deeply referential to surrealist and Dadaist painting it also reveals the inspiration of much more trivial influences. Disneyland and the color of American West-Coast photography have left a mark in Skoglund's work. It also presents traces of American horror films and, naturally, the anxieties of middle-class America, which Skoglund handles with ironic flair.