Ana María Rueda: Sensitive Chaos

The Sensitive Chaos is the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Ana María Rueda, highlighting the evolution of her multidisciplinary work of more than forty years, from her early 1980s paintings to new environmental pieces created for this show. The exhibition, named after Theodor Schwenk’s 1962 book, explores Rueda’s engagement with nature’s fluid forces, reflecting his ideas about the rhythmic patterns of water and air as foundational to life’s interconnected systems.

Rueda is recognized as a leading contemporary Colombian artist whose work examines the connections between the human body, earth, territory, plants, and landscapes. Her work centers on reciprocity, interdependence, vulnerability, and resilience, creating visual ecosystems that question our place within nature’s changing dynamics.

Vista de la instalación, El caos sensible de Ana María Rueda . ©
Galería Elvira Moreno / Fotografía de Gregorio Diaz, Bogotá 2026.

Her oeuvre often evokes organic textures and processes, featuring layered surfaces reminiscent of soil, roots, or flowing liquids. Rueda transforms everyday materials like gauze, clay, wire, branches, and plaster into powerful metaphors for interdependence and fragility. Spanning her early Water and Earth paintings from the 1980s, photographic series such as I am also the Other (2011), and immersive installations like First Drops of Water on Dry Grass (2023), her inspirations draw from rivers, stones, gardens, and natural cycles.

Consonance (2025-2026), created for this exhibition, reinterprets a series of flags, a symbol traditionally associated with conquest, ownership, and authority, decorating them with flowers as a natural and gentle gesture. Through this intervention, Rueda encourages viewers to find harmony in diversity, seek unity, and recognize the connections that sustain us all.

Vista de la instalación, El caos sensible de Ana María Rueda . ©
Galería Elvira Moreno / Fotografía de Gregorio Diaz, Bogotá 2026.

Through these works, Rueda addresses the possibility of renewal and healing after rupture, revealing beauty and subtle resistance in response to loss, environmental fragility, and erasure. These themes align closely with Schwenk’s philosophical perspective.

Schwenk’s book, based on Goethean observation and Steiner’s anthroposophical principles, argues that water and air display rhythmic patterns such as spirals, meanders, vortices, and oscillations. These are not random but archetypal forces shaping biology, geography, and cosmic rhythms. This view of nature’s “sensitive chaos” connects conceptually to Rueda’s work, where fluidity and sensitivity are central.

Vista de la instalación, El caos sensible de Ana María Rueda . ©
Galería Elvira Moreno / Fotografía de Gregorio Diaz, Bogotá 2026.

Vista de la instalación, El caos sensible de Ana María Rueda . ©
Galería Elvira Moreno / Fotografía de Gregorio Diaz, Bogotá 2026.

Rueda’s layered, translucent installations, reflect the sensitive membranes of skin, earth, and territory, capturing traces of contact and movement, similar to Schwenk’s descriptions of water flows. Water, represented in her work through metaphors, river imagery, and material qualities, appears as a living element that envelops, shapes, and connects all forms.

This exhibition honors Ana María Rueda’s decades-long artistic dedication to nature’s vital energies—a commitment rooted in observing what Theodor Schwenk termed the “sensitive chaos,” that paradoxical fusion of order and disorder. As ecological collapse accelerates globally, The Sensitive Chaos operates as both an aesthetic experience and an urgent call to action, inviting viewers to realign with the cyclical, self-organizing rhythms that sustain all life.

Curated by: Eugenio Viola: Born in Naples, Italy, he is a curator, art critic, and holds a PhD in Archaeological and Art-Historical Research Methods and Methodologies from the University of Salerno. He served as General Curator at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea DonnaRegina – MADRE – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea DonnaRegina from 2009 to 2016, where he was responsible for research related to the museum’s collection and co-curated the first large-scale exhibitions in Italy of artists such as Boris Mikhailov, Francis Alÿs, and Daniel Buren, among others. From 2017 to 2019, he was Chief Curator of the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA). He served as Artistic Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO) until 2026.