THE HISTORY OF ART FROM BOGOTÁ AT MAP

This Saturday, March 21, Montenegro Art Projects – MAP will open La historia del arte contada desde Bogotá (The History of Art from Bogotá), a group exhibition bringing together 30 artists whose practices engage with art history from a present-day perspective.

The project is grounded in a central question: how is art history activated today? Rather than approaching it as a closed archive, the exhibition proposes understanding it as a field in constant transformation. In contexts such as Colombia, this relationship with artistic tradition has taken on a particular character. As noted in Julián Serna’s curatorial text, “the material and symbolic distance separating major Western museums from the Colombian capital has turned the appropriation of art history into a recurring field of reflection: a strategy through which artists interrogate their position between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.”

In this sense, images, gestures, and references from the past reappear in new forms. Through appropriation, reinterpretation, and conceptual displacement, the works on view revisit visual traditions and reactivate them through contemporary sensibilities.

Among the participating artists, the exhibition highlights established trajectories such as those of Carlos Castro Arias, Fernando Uhía, Raúl Cristancho, Javier Vanegas, Juan Carlos Delgado, and Miler Lagos, whose works have developed sustained inquiries into the languages of painting, image-making, and visual culture. Their practices are presented alongside those of a diverse generation of artists, expanding the exhibition’s scope toward multiple formal and conceptual approaches.

The exhibition also includes a cabinet d’objets, a curatorial device inspired by cabinets of curiosities and early forms of museography, where works by J&L Constructores from their Art Collection series will be displayed. Inspired by the visual universe of variety shops and the logic of accumulation characteristic of popular commercial spaces such as San Victorino, the series features LEGO-style minifigures and collectible cards that reinterpret emblematic artists and figures from the country’s art history.

During ArtBo Fin de Semana, the exhibition will activate a special public program including guided tours with the curator and artists, as well as origin coffee tastings conceived as spaces for dialogue—extending the exhibition experience and fostering new forms of encounter between audiences, artworks, and their contexts.

Participating artists: Fernando Uhía, Beatriz González, Álvaro Barrios, Raúl Cristancho, María Consuelo García, Alma Sarmiento, Lina Sinisterra, Esteban Peña, Juan Mejía, Carlos Castro, Gustavo Niño, Ricardo León, Javier Vanegas, Juan Uribe, Samir Elneser, José Ricardo Contreras, J&L Constructores, Fernando García Vásquez, Jorge Vaca, Juan Santiago Uribe, Juan Carlos Delgado, Alberto Lezaca, Saúl Sánchez, Camilo Bojacá, Miler Lagos, Lorena Espitia, Diana Beltrán, Margarita Castro Guarín, Sergio Ferro, and María Eugenia Trujillo.