ANA ELENA GARUZ AT DIABLO ROSSO: PAUSING IN THE FACE OF CONTEMPORARY VISUAL EXCESS
The Panamanian gallery presents Greetings from Panama, an exhibition by Ana Elena Garuz that explores the links between the personal and the systematic. The show opens on May 24, 2025.
In this exhibition, Ana Elena Garuz presents a new series of works based on vintage tourist postcards from Panama—images originally conceived to portray a superficial version of the country—intervened with mixed media through minimal gestures, precise cuts, and subtle layering.
This series dialogues with paintings, drawings, and a sculpture, all sharing a sensitivity toward the fragmentary and the poetic reconfiguration of the everyday. The exhibition proposes an affective visual archaeology in which the intimacy of collage coexists with abstract geometries and sculptural compositions, offering a pause from contemporary visual overload and revealing, in each recovered detail, another way of understanding and inhabiting the world.
Her work begins with fragments of daily life that she classifies and reorganizes with near-systematic precision. Through minimal gestures and modest materials, Garuz creates compositions that reveal subtle connections between the intimate and the structural. What seems trivial is transformed into form, rhythm, and memory. Her approach to pictorial space moves between the two-dimensional and the object-like, revealing a sensibility rooted in abstraction, minimalism, and a poetics of the essential.
Ana Elena Garuz (Panama, 1971) is a visual artist whose practice centers on abstract painting and expands into collage, drawing, and sculpture as means to observe and reconfigure her surroundings. She studied Fine Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design and earned a Master’s degree in Art with a focus on painting from New York University. Throughout her career, Garuz has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Panama, Latin America, and the United States. She lives and works in Panama City, where she maintains a rigorous practice that turns the everyday into a refined and eloquently quiet visual language.
Greetings from Panama opens May 24 at Diablo Rosso, Ave. Central and Parque de Santa Ana. Heurtematte Building, Ground Floor, Santa Ana (Panama).
*Cover image: Ana Elena Garuz. Made in USA, 2024. Collage and painted paper with acrylic on postcard, 8.8 x 14cm. Courtesy of Diablo Rosso.
May interest you
PANAMA: A VIBRANT ART SCENE WITH A MARKET STILL IN DEVELOPMENT
Despite its rich, diverse artistic production with deep historical roots, Panama's art market remains limited. With fewer than ten active galleries and no fully established art fair to date, the country’s artistic ecosystem is still in an early stage of development. However, creative energy is clearly present, and 2025 could mark a turning point.
AN EXHIBITION ROOTED IN EMOTION AT CASA SANTA ANA
Artist Lorena Torres presents Nada es distinto, a series of paintings that explore personal emotions through a direct relationship between lived experience and gesture. The work functions as an intimate record, where painting operates more as testimony than as aesthetic object.
PORTRAITS OF THE PANAMANIAN REVOLUTION
The Museum of the Mola inaugurated the photographic exhibition Portraits of Struggle: 100 Years of the Dule Revolution by renowned Guna photographer Lois Iglesias.
PINTA PANAMÁ ART WEEK: AN EVENT POISED TO PUT THE CITY ON THE GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY ART MAP
Pinta Panamá Art Week makes its debut from May 21 to 25. Over five days, it will offer a public program filled with art activities, inviting attendees to explore a city undergoing a cultural boom. This first edition positions Panama City as a key destination on the international art and culture calendar.
JUAN CANELA AT MAC PANAMÁ: A COLLABORATIVE, CONTEXTUAL CURATORIAL APPROACH
MAC Panamá's Chief Curator Juan Canela, reflects on the challenges of curating in Central America, the value of collaborative practices, and the context of Panamanian art. He is participating in the inaugural Pinta Panamá Art Week, running May 21–25 with activities centered on the local art scene.
PANAMA’S FIRST NATIONAL PAVILION AT THE VENICE BIENNALE ARRIVES AT THE MUSEO DEL CANAL
After a successful showing in 2024 at this major international platform for contemporary art, the exhibition Surcos: En el cuerpo y en la tierra (Furrows: On the Body and the Land) returns to the country and will open on April 25 at the Museo del Canal in Panama City’s historic Casco Antiguo.
