The face of Colombian art is changing. A country of staggering ecological, geographical, and cultural diversity, Colombia has only recently been able to move on from the long nightmare that the civil war (1964-2016) has been. Local artists, including notable figures such as Beatriz González, Doris Salcedo, and Oscar Muñoz found ways to express the shared suffering and rage that resulted from it. Their work detailing the conflict came to define the country’s creative expression, both inside its borders and to the rest of the world.

But with peace accords in place since 2016, a new generation of artists has emerged with serious concerns of their own. The great conflict, which was rightfully central to their forebears’ practices, is no longer chief among them.

The Colombian war was a tragedy of enormous proportion, five decades long, with hundreds of thousands dead or simply disappeared, creating deep wells of emotional trauma that are only now being fully understood. The art that came of it was undeniable in its power to tell the story of the brutality and hopelessness that defined the era.

The aforementioned peace accords, meant to reduce hostilities between the government and rebel factions, have been torturously slow to implement; resentment lingers and, no doubt, human rights violations continue in multiple regions. But the process of laying down arms has gradually permitted violence and national discord to diminish as the dominant topics of conversation.

‘There was so much of that for so long, and it was exhausting in a way,’ says Steven Guberek, who owns SGR, a commercial gallery in Bogotá. ‘Of course artists are going to talk about the reality of their society, but that became a cliché and it did not allow space for different conversations.’

Like in the city of Bucaramanga, near the Venezuelan border, where the artist Sebastián Sánchez has reimagined the idea of an ‘oil painting,’ using actual crude oil extracted from the earth as the media for his line drawings of waterfowl, crocodiles, and sea mammals. The works, on gold paper, underscore the devastating impact of reckless mining and drilling on the region’s wildlife.

Or in the small village of Barichara, in the northern state of Santander, where Colectivo Mangle, the arts collective of husband-and-wife team María Paula and Diego Fernando Álvarez, uses traditional craft techniques to transform locally sourced wood into objects that appear soft and fluid. There is some alchemy in the way their objects made from rigid materials look like folded blankets and crinkled paper, but also an exploration of individual memory and loss.

And, of course, it is happening in Bogotá, the country’s cultural center and a magnet for artists from across Colombia, where names new and known are getting fresh attention. One example is 46-year-old Paulo Licona, who has been making art for decades but is now finding a new audience, successfully crossing into fashion with a line of popular apparel bearing his Amor logo.

There are also fresh faces making inroads with collectors and curators, such as 32-year-old Lorena Torres, originally from the coastal city of Barranquilla, whose moody, figurative oil paintings capture, as she describes it, the ‘surreal, fiery, gritty’ perspective of an artist with roots in Colombia’s Caribbean region.

These artists are being invited into establishment galleries, like the Bogotá stalwart Casas Riegner. The gallery has been on a quest to add fresh voices to its esteemed roster of names, both living and deceased, who have long served as ambassadors for Colombian art, including González, Luis Roldán, Rosemberg Sandoval, and Antonio Caro. A pioneer of Colombian conceptual art, Caro had seven works acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York earlier this year.

Casas Riegner recently brought on the artist Carlos Alfonso, who it encountered through an open call it put out to artists across the country. More than 300 portfolios came in, according to the curator Paula Bossa, who sorted through them all, giving her a unique window into the thinking of the emerging voices. ‘I definitely see a shift in terms of what themes artists are addressing,’ she says.

Among the hotter topics are the environment, economic equity, and spirituality, along with an examination of cultural heritage and Indigenous rights. While these subjects have been explored at length by contemporary artists beyond Colombia for some time, they had been overshadowed locally by an emphasis on the urgent matters of life and death wrought by the civil war.

In recent years, the big, international attention has been going to projects like Fragmentos (2018), Salcedo’s huge artwork made from rifles surrendered by rebels after the accords that were melted into malleable sheets of metal. The piece, installed in a public building just a few blocks from the presidential palace in Bogotá’s downtown, serves as a monument to victims of the conflict on all sides

Alfonso, who is 36 and lives in the town of Tabio near Bogotá, is a rising star. He works in a variety of media but often uses images of food and other commodities that represent various regions of Colombia, making objects and installations that explore ‘transformation, connection, and looking at ancestral knowledge,’ as Bossa describes it. Among his projects is a cookbook, created in collaboration with the anthropologist Cristina Consuegra, with both recipes and illustrative ink drawings that connect the act of cooking to the idea of communal art-making.

This month, in his first solo exhibition at Casas Riegner, Alfonso is showing some of his paintings. The oil and acrylic works often combine, within the same canvas, still-life settings of fruits and vegetables arranged on plates with documentary scenes of food cultivation that seem to be drawn from ancient times.

‘A plate on a table is not just a plate,’ he says. ‘It’s more a series of events and a series of hard work that came together.’

Adding another layer, Alfonso inserts long bodies of text underneath his visual images, challenging viewers to look deeper. He is especially interested in ideas around the forgotten health and medicinal value of early Colombian diets. 

‘The paintings are colorful. They have representations of things you could recognize,’ he says. ‘But when you start reading the text you realize there are certain situations that aren’t as beautiful as the rest of the painting.’

For emerging talents, getting noticed by the public – and potential collectors – remains a challenge throughout Colombia, including Bogotá, a place rich with artistic ambitions but low on museums and galleries compared with other cities its size around the world.

In that regard, artists have got very creative, putting together temporary exhibitions they produce for themselves or colleagues. The most visible, and perhaps crucial, change in Bogotá’s art scene in recent years is the self-empowerment of artists who operate outside the normal commercial gallery and art fair system.

One example is Cachorra, a monthly pop-up exhibition that the artist Nicolás Barrera curated during the pandemic with the goal of providing newcomers with an opportunity to introduce themselves to the public.

It wasn’t about selling, says Barrera, who makes conceptual work about culture and consumerism and teaches at Bogotá’s University of the Andes. He wanted to offer exposure and give artists well-curated shows they could tout when approaching galleries for representation or applying to colleges for graduate programs. The one requirement for getting a show, besides talent: the artists had not had a solo exhibition prior to showing with Cachorra.

‘I couldn’t offer fees for exhibiting or money to produce the work, but I said to the artists, “If you need something, I can help you make it. I will set up the space for you. I will paint, I will get the walls ready,”’ he adds.

Cachorra – which translates to puppy in Spanish – started small but grew in popularity until its openings overflowed with visitors and it had to shut down temporarily while it searches for new venues. Many people noticed, including the curators at Casas Riegner, who saw the energy Cachorra generated and invited its organizers to take over a space in the gallery for a show in August 2022. It was an example of the established gatekeepers of Colombian art making room for the country’s new voices. 

‘We have very few institutions, and so these artist-run initiatives are also very important for the art scene in general,’ Bossa says.

Toward the end of this month, audiences will be able to see another example of Colombia’s emerging do-it-yourself business model in the form of the art fair DD/MM/AAAA, which takes place during the same week as Bogotá’s international art fair ArtBo.

The satellite brings together 25 Colombian artists whose work does not ‘obey the commercial norms’ of the art world, according to Juan Sebastián Peláez, a highly respected Bogotá artist and entrepreneur and one of eight local creatives who are pooling their resources and energy to produce the event.

It is a bottom-up affair. ‘If you want to participate you have to put in [US]$100,’ Peláez says – but it’s not small by any means. Much of the work on display will be site-specific and monumental in size, according to Peláez, and all of it will shine a light on what is happening – and what is coming next – in Colombian contemporary art. 

Ray Mark Rinaldi is an arts journalist and critic based in Mexico City and Denver, Colorado. He contributes regularly to The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Dwell, Opera America, and other publications.

Published on November 23, 2023.

Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá. 2. A view of Lorena Torres' studio. 3. Downtown Bogotá. 4. Carlos Alfonso in front of one of his works. 5. The streets of Bogotá at night. All images and videos by Faber Franco for Art Basel.