José Antonio Suárez
In 1974, José Antonio Suárez began his training process in different printmaking techniques under the guidance of Yomaira Posada. In 1977 he attended a course given by Augusto Rendón at Taller de Artes in Medellín. Between 1978 and 1984 he studied at the School of Visual Arts in Geneva (Switzerland). Upon his return to Colombia, the members of the Printmaking Studio offered their facilities for him to print his work, he continued working with them until 1999 —the year when this space closed its doors— and then took his printmaking production to the La Estampa Studio (1999 – 2014). In 1986 Centro Colombo Americano organized an exhibition of the prints made by Suárez between 1978 and 1984, that exhibition launched his professional career beyond the national borders. In 2018 and under his own tutelage, he formed the group Grabadores de Domingo which operated in a private studio at the Fatima neighborhood until the break of the pandemic; since 2021, this group meets two Sundays a month at the Talante Printing Studio.
Suarez is one of the great drawers and printmakers of this country with a name that also has international recognition. His small-format works give testimony of his daily life, of the news events commented on side notes, of his friends, of the books that he reads, of the music that he listens to, of the cities and museums that he visits. He pays tribute to the art of the past and the present, self-portraits and different things that cheer up his sensitive spirit. He is utterly convinced of his craft as a way of living without having to wonder about it. “Suárez has done no other thing than to lay beauty on his lap, eluding any bitter taste it may have.” (Elkin Restrepo, 1999)
His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2013), the MoMA in New York (2010) and the Sao Paulo Biennial (2000).
José Antonio Suárez Londoño | MoMA
María Teresa Cano
Between 1982 and 1983, María Teresa Cano took us all by surprise with two early works that signaled an expanded the horizon of perception towards the understanding of new graphic strategies that went beyond the traditional processes; to paraphrase Melissa Aguilar and Jorge Lopera (2017), in these works the body is either present in its immaterial condition to encode its presence in time —Untitled / Self-Portrait— or in its material condition to make reference to a common practice of the body in the domestic domain —Warmth of Home—. During the act of looking at the latter the association of the word with the image becomes unavoidable.
Luis Camnitzer
Between 1980 and 1984, six local artists studied printmaking and photoengraving with the German-Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer, whose approach to art teaching sparked their interest: “I am not interested in teaching how to paint. I am interested in teaching how to perceive and find the means to achieve that perception.” His students were Álvaro Marín and Julián Posada in 1980; Luis Fernando Mejía and Ricardo Peláez, in 1981; Armando Montoya and Jorge Jaramillo, in 1983 and 1984. As a result of this process of training, Álvaro Marín became a member of the team of professors of the University of Antioquia’s Printmaking Workshop, while Luis Fernando Mejía and Ricardo Peláez founded the Printmaking Studio in 1983.
Three Graphic Proposals
In 1985 the exhibition Three Graphic Proposals opened at Centro Colombo Americano in Medellin: “This exhibition brings together three artists who, moved by ideas based on the urban outline, create an analytical body of work in which the serial processes and the technology (photography, silkscreen, etching) are set out as elements that enhance the creative activity.” (Hugo Zapata, 1985). In the exhibition participated Tulio Restrepo, Armando Montoya and Jorge Jaramillo and had such relevance that the directors decided to implement this initiative on the Bogota, Bucaramanga, Cali and Manizales Centro Colombo Americano Centers as an itinerant program with young Colombian printmakers.
Linocut
The boom of this somewhat artisanal printmaking technique took place during the conjunction of the 1980s and the 1990s, and was considered a milestone in the evolution of printmaking in Antioquia. Lost plate linoleum found in Luis Fernando Uribe, Fabián Rendón, Flor María Bouhot, Armando Montoya, Francisco Londoño and Miguel Polling the names that took it to the peak. The distinctive feature of “lost plate linoleum” is the use of a matrix that gets gradually modified as each color is printed; in the end, the matrix is left unusable due to the removal of matter (for that reason, the whole edition needs to be decided beforehand). It is also characterized by a color density which is similar to that of painting and its registration system for the printing. This technique gained relevance when Fabián Rendón’s linocuts received an honorable mention at the 23rd Salon of Colombian Artists, in 1989; that same year, Armando Montoya received the first prize at the University of Antioquia’s National Culture Awards. In the article Situación de la gráfica colombiana actual, 1980-1993, (Graphic Work in Colombia, 1980-1993) Beatriz González dedicated a section to Medellin and its insular figures, giving particular prominence to linocut work: “The interest in printmaking is shared in Medellin by several artists who have found in linocut a means of creative expression. It would not be possible to refer to them as a group or a school because they are not bound together by an ideological stance. They were simply drawn to carving, not on wood as master artist Aníbal Gil did in that city in the 1960s, but on a modern yet neglected material, linoleum.” Galleries such as La Mansarda and Originales in Medellín became big promoters of this medium.
Grupo Grafito
Grafito Group
In 1997 Gloria Posada, Carlos Uribe, Ana María Arango and Alejandra Gaviria created Grafito Group with the purpose of using the city as a printmaking matrix. They resorted to frottage, a simple yet powerful procedure that allowed them to set their vision on a city in process of uncontrolled growth, which embraced the project of modernity as a way to obliterate its own memory. The streets and the avenues were witnesses of this transformation: “Each surface became unique in its fissures, materials, embedded objects, rails, stairs, sewers, use and repair. The different textures of each floor, showed a singular spatial and temporal momentum.” The nine fragments selected for this exhibition are just a sample of the large-scale research project that was carried out in the sixteen districts of Medellín.
Printmaking Collection of the Arts Faculty of the University of Antioquia
In 1991 Hernando Guerrero, along with a group of colleagues and students, promoted “a novel mechanism for the exchange of the works produced in the Printmaking Workshop of the Arts Faculty of the University of Antioquia through the concept of the donation, in an attempt to create a collection of graphic work produced by students, graduates and teachers who voluntarily decided to be part of the project” (Hernando Guerrero, 2023). That venture led to the creation of the Printmaking Collection of the Arts Faculty which, in turn, was the starting point for the Graphic Artwork Biennial (1993, 1995, 1997 and 2000) and the National Graphic Work Salon held in 2002. In 2012, the Arts Faculty Council relocated the Printmaking Collection to the University Museum, as it was considered that this facility was the most appropriate place to hold that material.
If you are interested in learning more about the collection or its history, please consult this content.
Colección de Grabado – Galería (udea.edu.co)
Yuli Cadavid
She is an artist, a printmaker and a teacher with a degree from the Arts Faculty of the University of Antioquia (2010), where she took classes with Hernando Guerrero and Ángela María Restrepo. She was the recipient of a grant from the Lithography Master Printer Program of the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico, between 2007 and 2008; during the same period, she studied non-toxic printmaking with Neal Ambrose-Smith. His relationship with lithography is linked to the Aníbal Gil legacy, a person to whom she gives special recognition. She currently works as a printmaking professor at the Aníbal Gil Graphic Techniques Laboratory of the Arts Faculty of the University of Antioquia. She is the founder of the Talante Printing Studio, specialized in the printing of artists’ books and non-toxic printmaking, a process that replaces matrices and several type of mordants with environmentally friendly processes (photopolymer plates, saline mordants and sun exposure).
Her work proposes a relationship between printmaking and the matrix from her perspective as a woman and as a mother, the bearer of ancestral memories inherited from her grandmother, especially related to medicinal plants.
Ángela María Restrepo
She studied printmaking with master artist Aníbal Gil at Institute of Fine Arts of the University of Antioquia during the 1960s. Upon working as a professor at Taller de Artes, Museo de Antioquia and the Museum of Modern Art, she joined and was part of the Printmaking Studio between 1985 and 1999, when she created the La Estampa Studio, where she promotes new talents in this discipline. Since 2004, she has been a printmaking professor at the Aníbal Gil Graphic Techniques Laboratory of the Arts Faculty of the University of Antioquia.
Her works allude to the daily life that emerges from the beauty of the simple things that fill her house and give evidence of a detained, quiet time. I picture her, probably, with a cup of tea in her hands, staring at the horizon, oblivious to the city and letting herself get lost in the domain of the memories that live in her, Ángela, in loving solitude, shares with us a little bit of her intimacy and establishes a conversation with the bedroom, the chairs, the pets, the garden and the longed-for landscape. Her print work talks about this slow and self-absorbed dialogue in the midst of the urban turmoil. “The experience of contemplating at her work is like opening a diary written in a quiet voice, with no exclamations but full of harmony” (Ana Cristina Vélez, 2018).
Yomaira Posada
She studied printmaking with master artist Aníbal Gil at Institute of Fine Arts of the University of Antioquia during the 1960s. Upon working as a professor at Taller de Artes, Museo de Antioquia and the Museum of Modern Art, she traveled to Spain, returned to Medellín and then settled in Guatemala permanently until 2019, when she came back to Medellín.
Her early print work was stormy, full of the horrors of violence and the fears of life, a thematic violence inherited from her teachers. On more than one occasion she experienced rejection due to the topics she dealt with in her work, issues that did not go beyond the events of her time: mistreatment, discrimination, the victims of generalized violence in the face of an indifferent society that behaved as it nothing had happened, and for whom she stood for and called for equality of rights. The selected prints show two stages in her production, one of them is focused on social issues and the other on everyday domestic situations.
Gloria Escobar
She studied printmaking with master artist Aníbal Gil at Institute of Fine Arts of the University of Antioquia during the 1960s. She worked as a professor at the University of Antioquia, the National University and private studios. She has a master’s degree in printmaking from the Syracuse University in the United States; in addition to specializing in printmaking, she also did research work on handmade paper at the same institution. She has also worked in the production of artists’ books.
She worked as master printer at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Studio in New York City for three years, and as a professor at the Art Department of Hartwick College in the United States for 17 years; she retired as Professor Emeritus. She returned to Colombia in 2009 to continue working in printmaking and other techniques such as ecoprint, cyanotype, monotype on gelli plate, and special projects on paper.
Ecoprint is an innovative method based on the use of plants with high tannin content; each individual plant is wrapped in paper and pressed and tied with a hand-crafted binding before they undergo a boiling process in a solution of water with oxidizing substances (iron sulfates); the boiling process releases a dye from the plants, transferring the shape and color (somewhat randomly) to the paper.
This process is closely related to alchemy, the results of which depend on random factors —the quality of the plants, the amount of tannin in the plants and oxidants in the solution, the time of cooking, cooling and drying—. Eureka!
Luis Fernando Mejía
He is an architect who decided to fully dedicate himself to art. In 1981, he traveled to Valdottavo, Italy in the company of Ricardo Peláez to study printmaking at Studio Camnitzer. Two years after their return, they decided to found the Printmaking Studio in 1983, a space that remained in operation until its closure in 1999. This studio was the epicenter for the education of many printmakers who still today are part of the artistic scene of this region. In 1997 he joined the Faculty of Arts of the University of the Antioquia as printmaking professor until his death in 2004. Alongside his work at the university, he worked on his artistic production in his own studio.
His works show a refined and loving craftsmanship with the materials he used, dealing with multiple topics and approaches ranging from still lives, landscapes of local natural settings, indoor domestic scenes, metaphysical architectural spaces, female figures and religious prints to the production of a large number of portfolios either personal or commissioned by private companies. His monotypes have an extraordinary pictorial value and mark a relevant peak at the national level; he moves from drawing, which is the basis of printmaking, and color and stain, which are the basis of painting to monotypes whose brushstrokes dominate the format, creating an atmosphere of mystery; example of the above are his monotypes Smoke, Steam and Fog.
Óscar Jaramillo
Jaramillo is an exceptional draftsman and engraver with a realistic imprint that borders on hyperrealism, his realism lies both on his formal language and on the reality that he lived and experienced surrounded by the characters and environment that he draws. In 1977 he traveled to Bogotá to study printmaking with Humberto Giangrandi; there, he discovered the craft and technique that relate him to drawing and chiaroscuro, a process known as “mezzotint”, a technique that consists of fully dotting the matrix in such a way as to produce a totally black print, due to the dotted surface.
The image is created by going back from black to white, using scrapers and burnishers that crush the dots with different levels of intensity, until the necessary balance between light and darkness is achieved in order to create the image; white is the result of totally crushing the dots. This printmaking technique is the one that makes possible the light and dark tones that move from the figure to the background and the other way around, necessary to create the night and the faces of a festive, hidden and devious dawn. The street and the bars became his environment and the night his milieu, revealing, among those faces, a promotional ad, a tapestry or a metal fabric curtain as ornamentation where the new dwellers of the brothel, of Lovaina, of the night, of art get to be revealed. “Beauty is the Face of Evil” (Jesús Gaviria, 2002).
Fabián Rendón
He studied printmaking with master artist Aníbal Gil at Institute of Fine Arts of the University of Antioquia during the 1970s, where he discovered a connection with linocut, a technique that he, along with Luis Fernando Uribe, explored and refined in an empirical way since 1980. In 1986 he settled in Bogota with his family and in his studio, he developed his whole creative process until his death in 2000. One of the many contributions that Fabián made to linocut, a fact that was acknowledged by Uribe, was the initial application of a plain dark color as structural support for the line in the subsequent impressions.
His work was recognized with an honorable mention on the 23rd Salon of Colombian Artists (1989); in addition, his printmaking book Cuaderno de mapas was one of seven winners on the 11th San Juan Biennial of Latin American Printmaking, held in 1995 in Puerto Rico. Fabian and Luis Fernando traveled to many regions of Colombia as teachers of linocut printmaking in workshops organized by the cultural program of Banco de la República.
Fabián found his own style and discovered the perfect texture to complement the shape of his characters in printmaking, which in a sort of enchantment, a kind of spell with the festive and joyful afterlife, march on the antechamber of a surreal circus. Human and not so human mutants, jugglers, tightrope walkers, fire breathers, dwarves and ghosts come to life in his works. Engrossed by the magic of his acts, Fabián wakes up to see the results only when the printmaking is already finished.
