Juan Gallo’s Collection
Museo de Arte Moderno, Ciudad Río venue. Medellín
Traditionally, art collecting has been one of the marginal themes in the history of Colombian art. Except for some exhibitions of the cycle “La mirada del coleccionista” sponsored by the Luis Ángel Arango Library of the Banco de la República, where the collections of Hernando Santos and the Ganitsky Guberek family were presented, the role of private collecting in the construction of historiography, artistic taste and museums has been overlooked in numerous exhibitions and publications.
The exhibition “Crónica 1995/2005 en la colección Juan Gallo”, curated by Mariángela Méndez and presented in the renovated space of the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín (Ciudad Río venue), helps to attenuate this void in the country ́s panorama of exhibitions. The late art dealer Juan Gallo, founder of Al Cuadrado Gallery, was one of Bogotá’s the most notorious collectors of contemporary art. With his good eye and capacity for anticipation he managed to form a collection that now seems classical in the panorama of contemporary Colombian art. The selection, consisting of around forty works presented on this occasion includes important works by artists like Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Rodrigo Facundo, Juan Fernando Herrán, Libia Posada, Johanna Calle and Delcy Morelos, among others.
Undoubtedly, the selection of works is evidence of some of the concerns of the generation of Colombian artists structured around the decades of 1980 and 1990: the displacement in representation of violence not any more as a concrete fact but as a sign or trace, the growing interest in the new forms of expression such as photography, installation and video, the concern for the condition of the body as a subject of violence and the technical and thematic turn of painting since the 1980s.
