Environmental Tension.
Colección en Escena #8

Environmental Tension presents the third staging of Santiago Cárdenas’s (Bogotá, 1937) first installation and painting at human-scale, Environmental Spaces II (Homage to Marta Traba), created specifically for MAMBO. By mapping the connective threads that, since the outset of modernity in Colombia, have intimately linked urban growth, architecture, abstraction, and figuration, this exhibition highlights the importance of Environmental Spaces II as a seminal work, casting light on the developments and frictions that characterized art in Colombia after 1945.

Cárdenas installation synthesizes these tensions. While the simplicity with which he creates the illusion of virtual space within actual space draws the work toward abstraction, by disturbing our perception of what appears to escape the compositional plane, as well as our sensation of the space itself, the installation simultaneously verges on hyperrealism. The artworks exhibited alongside Environmental Spaces II emerge from this tension between abstraction, figuration, and architecture— historical frictions that profoundly marked Colombian art during the second half of the twentieth century.

The entanglement of modernity and modernization in Colombia, particularly since the 1970s, allowed for the emergence and coexistence of proposals as disparate as the architectural abstraction of Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar and the urban photorealism of Ever Astudillo. This heterogeneous landscape developed over the course of decades marked by forced displacement, growing industrialization, and profound changes in ways of living. Confronted with an increasingly fragmented society, art interrogated its own purpose, rebelling against tradition.

Photography and the graphic arts thus began to be utilized as forms worthy of artistic experimentation, drawing on urban spaces where the geometric planes of modern buildings progressively occupied the city skyline, and where design and advertising had already taken over the visual imaginary. Surrounded by these changes, the bodies of work of Gabriel Carvajal, Carlos Caicedo, and Maripaz Jaramillo stand out for their avid documentation of growing cities and of the human behaviors that increasingly inhabited these new spaces. Like Cárdenas in Environmental Spaces II, artists like Jonier Marín and Adolfo Bernal rejected both the object and the compositional plane, understanding the idea itself as their primary material, and embracing language, the city, and even their own bodies as their artistic medium.

The concerns of generations of artists since 1945 are summarized in each of the pioneering gestures of Environmental Spaces II. Without their convulsions and refusals, without their singular forms of tensing the threads of the possible, neither life nor art would appear as they do today.

Address
24th Street #6-00, Bogotá, Colombia

Opening Hours

Tuesday to Saturday: 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Last admission: 5:15 p.m.
Sundays and public holidays: 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Last admission: 4:15 p.m.
Closed on Mondays and on Tuesdays following a public holiday.

For further information:

Amalia López Siegert
Communications Coordinator, MAMBO
coordinacion.comunicaciones@mambogota.com
(+57) 301 428 2682

Estefanía Otavo
Communications Assistant, MAMBO
comunicaciones@mambogota.com
(+57) 305 738 7471