José Alejandro Restrepo
Museo de Arte del Banco de la República. Bogota
For many years, Colombian artist José Alejandro Restrepo has developed a research focused on the relationships between art, body, religion and violence. In his production as a video-artist, this interest becomes evident in works like Video Verónica (2000- 2004), Santa Lucía (2005) and Cabeza de San Juan Bautista (2005), some of which were presented together with works from the collection of the Museo de Arte Colonial de Bogotá in the framework of the 40th National Artists Salon (2006).
Some of the theoretical results of this research have been divulged through publications such as “Cuerpo gramatical: Cuerpo, arte y violencia” (Bogotá: Universidad de Los Andes, 2006) and currently, through the temporal exhibition “Habeas corpus: que tengas [un] cuerpo [para] expon- er” held in the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, and curated by Restrepo together with Colombian historian Jaime Borja.
The exhibition, which occupies the second and third levels of the build- ing, is basically divided into four great spaces: (i) Exposed body, (ii) Hidden body, (iii) Fragmented body and (iv) Martyred body. The artist and the historian establish a provoking and stimulating dialogue between the various works, both artistic and historic, elaborated on different supports and pertaining to different times. In this way, in the “Exposed body” space, for example, different approaches to the female body are presented: the ideal of the redeemed prostitute represented in the colonial oil painting María Magdalena, sexual violence against the body in Trata de blancas (Ca. 1940) of Débora Arango, and a pregnant woman, shot, confused with Colombia ́s geography, embodying the country’s historic conflict, in the famous painting Violencia (1962) by Alejandro Obregón.
Amidst installations and photographs by Louise Bourgueois, Vik Muniz, León Ferrari and Peter Joel Witkin, there are reliquaries, oil paintings and sculptures that represent martyred saints (elaborated during the colonial period), popular carvings from the early 20th century, body parts made in wax that were used in medical school at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the uniform of murdered independence general Antonio José de Sucre, mortuary masks and historic photographs. Through this vast and interesting repertoire, curators present some of the changes in direction which, in the body’s conception, have been occurring in different times of history.
