Sophia Vari International Collection Exhibit

“I don’t want today’s Colombian artists to go through what I went through. I had to learn to paint without seeing a single original painting from outside Latin America. Colombians will have access to this repertoire of works from Europe and North America.”

Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero’s intention in donating his international art collection has, among other motivations, an altruistic and pedagogical purpose that he expressed in numerous interviews: that local artists can access international references without experiencing the difficulties he himself faced when approaching art from other geographical and cultural contexts, as the only options he had were reproductions printed in books and magazines, full of limitations of scale and context. This intention, which coincided with the turn of the century, has been overwhelmed by a hyperconnected world where it is assumed, but not always fulfilled, that artists have access to large amounts of information and opportunities for the circulation of their ideas and works.

“Once the difficulty” of artists from the periphery accessing these references is overcome, a new problem arises: the specter of Eurocentrism and the cultural hegemony exercised from centers of political and economic power, which keeps many countries of the so-called Global South, including Colombia, in a complex relationship of subordination. Understanding how these tensions have determined the development of local arts in many cases becomes increasingly urgent to continue consolidating more conscious and relevant artistic practices in the face of the challenges presented by the contemporary world.

For this reason, we propose as the main axis of the room the painting Liberation (the red mouth), 1947, by the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, who knew how to integrate in his work the most important characteristics of European avant-gardes with his African and Caribbean heritage, anticipating by decades discussions on topics such as globalization, transculturation, or decolonization. His life and work, of deep political and aesthetic commitment, allowed him to critically address the tensions of a world marked by wars and political and social crises without renouncing his mixed-race origin and identity.

To learn more about an artist in this exhibition, click on their name.

Auguste Rodin

One of the most accepted topics to understand the irruption of modernity in 20th-century art is through painting and its transformations; however, in the transition between old customs and modernity, sculpture was no exception.

What is fundamental in sculpture and what can be removed while maintaining its essence? One of the great questions contained in Rodin’s work, influenced by the broken sculptures of antiquity, was whether an emotion or idea could be read by representing only a part of the body and not its entirety. His fragmented and emotion-filled bodies distanced his work from the precepts and traditions of fine arts and the hierarchical order of Parisian salons that privileged painting. Another of his contributions was considering the public as an active and complementary part of his sculptures, thanks to the elimination of the pedestal, a definitive milestone for the irruption of sculpture into modernity.

Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero’s facet as a sculptor is perhaps the least studied; the focus of all analyses has always been on his painting, deeply influenced thematically and formally by the Italian Renaissance, characterized by monumental forms, rhythmic compositions of geometric rigor, and a harmonious color palette.

When his pictorial universe found balance—in the way color, form, composition, and theme integrated—the initial monumentality of his Renaissance-inspired figures gave way to another order: volume, which made his images emblems of static and deformed sensuality. With sculpture, the artist resumed the lost monumentality; his references were Greek, Roman, and even Egyptian sculptures, monumental and mutilated, which inspired his castings of giant hands and heads, his versions of Venus, and his sphinxes. His interest in Rodin, who based much of his work on broken and mutilated sculptures of the past, was not coincidental.

Roberto Matta

Roberto Matta was one of the most important representatives of modernity in 20th-century Latin American art. After finishing his studies in architecture, he traveled to Europe; there, he spent a season in Spain and then arrived in Paris, where he met all the intellectuals of the moment, including André Breton, who introduced him to the circle of the surrealist movement.

With great sensitivity and mystical beliefs, his work explored the depths of the psyche and human consciousness through images that present a reality not assimilable with the tangible and what surrounds us. His paintings are like projections of psychological states in which aspects of intense humanity contrast with the infinity of the universe; at some point, he called these types of images “interior landscapes.” Fleeing World War II, he migrated to New York in 1939. His work, characterized by surrealist automatism, influenced the subsequent consolidation of abstract expressionism.

Rufino Tamayo

A Mexican painter of great influence in his country and Latin America. His work was not without controversy due to the depoliticized approach he gave to his painting, away from social realism and many of the revolutionary principles that characterized Mexican muralism; this, in part, thanks to the art critic and manager José Gómez Sicre, who was the director of Visual Arts of the Pan American Union—today known as the OAS.

This antagonism with muralism—mainly represented by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros—allowed him to connect Latin American themes with the most contemporary artistic trends of the mid-20th century; in part, this new sensitivity was due to his frequent and prolonged stays in Paris and New York. His work, full of poetry and formal experimentation, expanded the possibilities of the cubist language and opened new paths for Latin American art, influencing painters like Cuevas and Botero, as well as important North American artists.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst, a pioneer of Dada and Surrealism, was one of the key artists of the early avant-garde. His participation in World War I marked the tone of his work, which focused on the search for an art that evidenced the fractures of the modern world.

In line with the surrealist spirit, his works addressed the absurdity of the interwar period through the strangeness caused by fortuitous and casual encounters of objects and images. For this, he initially used collage, a medium with which he presented works in which the initial reality of the images is altered to the point of becoming sinister and threatening. In his paintings, his experimental nature led him to include procedures invented by himself, such as frottage and grattage, which rely on chance and the textures of objects and surfaces to compose representations of landscapes and faunas that almost never have a logical explanation but embody the dialogue between his personal mythologies and conscious and unconscious fears and anxieties. Many of his works, prior to World War II, are like omens of the devastation to come.

Frank Stella

Frank Stella was one of the prominent figures of postwar art in the United States. In his more than six decades of career, he consolidated an extensive body of work estimated at more than 10,000 paintings, prints, and sculptures.

The sobriety of his work, initially characterized by monochromy and hard edges (Hard edge painting), represented the natural transition from abstract expressionism, with its expressiveness and lyricism, to serene and rigorous images where color, line, and composition constituted the alphabet of a new way of understanding art and painting. This new sensitivity made his work the precursor of Minimalism. True to his conviction to return painting to its condition as an object—beyond being a mere representation of reality falsified by the illusion of depth of perspective—he always refused interpretations of his images; hence, he declared: “what you see is what you see.”

Jacques Lipchitz

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread and a bottle of water; and he gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, and the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered in the wilderness of Beersheba.

Genesis 21:14

Hagar in the desert was a common theme in European painting; beyond the devotional dimension, the expressive and dramatic possibilities of this biblical passage allowed many artists to explore various formal and compositional solutions with notable examples such as Paolo Veronese, Camille Corot, or Marc Chagall. For the Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, the theme of Hagar had autobiographical and political implications. Several casts of this sculpture rest in important museums around the world.

He migrated to Paris very young to study art (1909), where he approached his work as a sculptor from a cubist perspective. His goal was to free the chosen theme from its literal representation; therefore, in his sculptures, the dialogue of forms, volumes, and the balance of masses prevail over any classical and conventional representation of the themes.

By 1941, when Hitler’s army invasion of France was imminent, Lipchitz, who was Jewish, moved to New York. In 1948 and 1949, when he created his first versions of Hagar, Lipchitz was very concerned about the conflicts that arose with the formation of the new state of Israel; his desire was for peace to prevail. Regarding Hagar in the desert, he said that for him this sculpture meant “a prayer for brotherhood between Arabs and Jews.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928/2011)

Abstract expressionism took diverse elements to constitute its formal language: the fundamental influence of Native American art, the influence of Dada, which gave it its gesturality, chance, and freedom; finally, the evident connection with the great tradition of North American landscape, anchored, in turn, in English landscape painting, which made monumental panoramics out of these paintings that need to be explored by the body and the gaze due to their scale.

Helen Frankenthaler’s work knew how to capture the best of this type of painting and took it to a different level, where color expands freely on the canvas, finding its own natural eloquence. Her work became the bridge between abstract expressionism and color field painting, and her soak-stain painting technique became a revelation. When diluted, the color penetrates the fabric weaves, turning it into a kind of skin that rhythmically composes the visual suggestions of an interior landscape, close to the sensation and emotion that a real landscape produces in us, but far from its literal representation.

Wifredo Lam (1902/1982)

Liberation (La liberación), a painting that is an infinite crossroads

"People mistakenly believe that my work took its final form in Haiti. My stay there only extended it, just like the trip I made to Venezuela, Colombia, and the Brazilian Mato Grosso. I could have been a good painter of the Paris School, but I felt like a snail out of its shell. What truly extended my painting was the presence of African poetry."1

Wifredo Lam

The curatorial research developed for the renewal and assembly of the Sophia Vari International Room involved revisiting the works donated by Fernando Botero with curiosity and a critical spirit. The goal was to give this part of the donation a different criterion from the one maintained since the works arrived in Medellín, which was the anecdote filled with emotion and wonder, maintaining a certain distance of the room from the rest of the Museum’s spaces.

The initial diagnosis identified this conceptual separation from the other scripts of the Museum and proposed possible solutions to position the room as an integral part of the general curatorial structure, and not just as Fernando Botero’s private collection of international art. The main conclusion was that the time span of the works, artists, and themes of the room is the same as that of the two long-term rooms on the second floor of the Museum: Stories to Rethink and Promises of Modernity. This correlation is also found in the themes and ideas addressed in these spaces—understanding the differences in context and place—which can be defined as the emergence of modernity and its effects on the arts. The main conclusion at the end of the research process was that the room needed to have the same critical and reflective character as the rest of the Museum. Finding this coherence required delving into works and artists that reflected not only the spirit of their time but could also serve as a bridge between the past of the avant-garde and more contemporary concerns; for this reason, the central axis of the room was defined as the painting Liberation (the red mouth), 1947, by Wifredo Lam.

Armand Fernandez

France, naturalized American (1928/2005)

Symphonic Expansion, 1991

In the 1960s, Arman was at the forefront of the so-called New Realism, a group of artists who proclaimed “a new perceptual approach to the real” in art. His work is recognized for his ability to transform the everyday into art; he also assumed a social critique through the accumulation of objects and their influence on the development of modern art. It is precisely this accumulation that best defines what he wanted to convey. This critique of consumerism and industrial society is what makes Arman’s work so relevant and universal, addressing themes such as the excess of objects and the impact of mass production. His works, developed between the 1960s and early 2000s, continue to speak to us today, as we live on a planet facing substantial changes in the way we relate due to the excessive consumption of certain products. Countries at war trying to accumulate as much raw materials as possible for the production of everyday objects.

Sophia Vari

Greece (1940/2023)

The Root and the Night, 1996

Sophia Vari and Helen Frankenthaler are the only female artists in this room. Both achieved significant recognition globally, even beyond the field of arts. The limited presence of women in this room invites us to open a debate about how the history of Western art has been constructed and to question the role and participation of women in the artistic field. There are many interpretations that Sophia Vari’s work evokes, known for her monumental and abstract sculptures, and her passion for jewelry. She was also the main promoter of these donations; therefore, to pay tribute to her, the room bears her name. Sophia made art her life and knew how to share it.

Richard Estes (1932)

United States (1932)

Broadway Looking Towards Columbus Circle, 1991

Richard Estes is one of the founders of hyperrealism, also known as photorealism, characterized by imitating the appearance of photographs; his works capture reflections, shop windows, and urban scenes with meticulous detail. The focus on technique and the innovative use of light and color have earned him recognition in the art world. Estes’ work, beyond the photographic effect of his paintings, captures a fictitious moment; hence, he is recognized as “a modeler of lies.” He uses photography—claiming that he takes more than 100 photos for each painting—to propose games between realities and fictions. Who can faithfully capture reality, is it possible to do so? The power of Estes’ work, and the arts in general, lies in the possibility of articulating with the present; in this case, it invites us to question the accelerated changes in society, especially today when AI-generated images—tools that use the work of artists from various fields without permission—are becoming increasingly common and rapidly viralized as if they were real. Fiction surpassing reality.

Dieter Hacker (1943)

Germany (1942)

Journey to the End of the World, ca. 1987

Hacker is an important German artist, his works have a high political charge; he even distanced himself somewhat from the art market, especially since 1971, to develop the concept of artist-run gallery or self-managed spaces by and for artists. Additionally, his works from different periods and techniques highlight his socio-critical stances. The work present in this room corresponds precisely to the 1980s, when Dieter became famous as a painter within the known Neue Wilden, a term used by German artists to refer to neo-expressionism as a form of opposition to minimalist and conceptual art, proposing the use of intense colors and thick brushstrokes. Without losing sight of the critical dimensions proposed by the artist, we can highlight the importance of the work Journey to the End of the World in the current context: a present of exoduses and journeys in which migrations are the result of various socio-political situations that make our reality perceived or filtered by ideas of the end. A work that exhorts us to question our present.

Antonio Tàpies (1923/2012)

Spain (1923/2012)

White Point, 1997

It is important to recognize that by 1997 Antoni Tàpies was in a mature stage of his career, having achieved great international recognition as one of the most important Spanish artists of the 20th century. Tàpies’ works—including his books on art theory—immerse us in the complex spiritual possibilities, very characteristic of his work, inviting introspection and meditation. He first approached art at the age of 11, while recovering from a lung disease that caused him hallucinations. Tàpies’ work is a vindication of the variety that the arts allow, as in his works materials are protagonists: reliefs, torn fragments, lacerations, or cracks that give strength and expressiveness to his paintings. In 1974 he published a series of articles compiled in the book Art Against Aesthetics, a publication in which, referring to art, he wrote: “what is certain is that it is infinitely more important to feel it, live it, practice it, than to think about it.”

Antonio Tàpies (1923/2012)

Spain (1923/2012)

Rite, ca. 1998

For Antoni Tàpies, “a work of art should leave the viewer perplexed, make them meditate on the meaning of life,” and this is what happens when we immerse ourselves in his work Rite, a painting in which we can appreciate the way he experiments with materials: with sands and synthetic varnish, he presents us with a crucifixion with a deep spiritual sense; moreover, the support of the piece transcends its physical state to offer us a reflection on the human condition. In this painting, we cannot overlook these details: the X and the four corners that evoke four nails, recurring elements in many of his works that somehow refer to the crucifixion. The crucified Christ is a theme that repeats in the history of Western art, a relevant figure that allows us to remember many teachings that have been widely disseminated: detachment from material things, rejection of the accumulation of wealth, generosity, kindness, among other precepts that are so necessary in a world that shows us the horrors of war.

Robert Rauschenberg (1925/2008)

United States (1925/2008)

ROCI Mexico Dream, 1985

Rauschenberg experienced the transition between abstract expressionism and Pop Art. For this artist, expressionism was a pretentious movement typical of “old men.” Throughout much of his career, he was openly political and a passionate believer in the power of art to transform societies. His work is a countercultural critique that allows him to question situations such as the Vietnam War or the inability of some people to move freely in their own territories. ROCI stands for Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, a project he created with the intention of establishing intercultural bridges and dialogues. When he announced the launch of this initiative at the United Nations in December 1984, he said: “Based on my various itinerant collaborations, I can firmly believe that the direct contact established through art has a huge pacifying influence and that this is the least elitist way to share uncommon information.” Words that remain relevant in a world seeking peace and the free mobility of all its inhabitants.

Exposición temporal

TRANS / MIGRACIONES

Exposición temporal

LA CREACIÓN DEL GESTO

Exposición de larga duración

Sala Fernando Botero

Exposición de larga duración

Sala Promesas de la Modernidad

Sophia Vari International Collection Exhibit

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