ARTBO 2017

Bogotá, Colombia.

Artists: Andrés Felipe Uribe / Andrés Matías Pinilla

Dates: October 26th - 29th / 2017

Artworks

Espacio el Dorado presented works by Andrés Felipe Uribe and Andrés Matías Pinilla for ArtBO, 2017. Both artists’ work is in dialogue with themes around transactional processes, capital, and collecting.

Andrés Felipe Uribe’s work is a critical analysis of textual and visual languages around themes of institutions, as well as capital. The pieces shown in this instance are works born in the framework of the exhibition Los límites de mi mundo (The Limits of My World), held in the gallery Espacio El Dorado between july 22nd and september 30th of 2017.

Through acts of collecting and repetition, the artist accumulates a variety of wrappers and types a variety of poems on them. More than an exploration, the work seeks to deconstruct language to its smallest component. Andrés Felipe Uribe employs its formal characteristics (the physical appearance of the characters, rhyme) as well as language as a sign in its contextual “container”. Still, while the semiotic implications remain, the work maintains a playful tone, an enjoyment in the act of its own production.

Andrés Matías Pinilla presented a painting as well as Aguirre/agarra, made specifically for this event.

Andrés Matías Pinilla’s work, in its many manifestations, is articulated through questions around taste and aesthetics. For ArtBo 2017 he created the work Aguirre/agarra, a functional claw machine in which the spectator had the opportunity of winning a stuffed American monkey, signed by the artist. With this apparatus, a contemporary simulation of an Inca ruin, Pinilla appeals to an aesthetics of yearning, and kitsch. Thus, the artist references representations of the prehispanic Americas in popular culture, besides reflecting on the transactional nature of the art fair.

In this way, the work of both artists uses the act of play, emphasizing artistic processes related to commerce and collecting. Their approaches to the Colombian context come from these experiences of the banal, of the simple pleasure of something sweet or of entertainment.