MAMBO Pays Tribute to Gonzalo Ariza on the 100th Anniversary of his Birth

To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Colombian master Gonzalo Ariza, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogota, MAMBO, presents the exhibition entitled Poetics of the Landscape. This retrospective will be inaugurated on November 30 of this year and it will remain open until January 13 of 2013.

Consisting of nearly 57 pieces, most of these oils, this anthological exhibition includes works from the collections at MAMBO, the Museo Nacional, private collections, as well as from Ariza's family collection.

A watercolorist, engraver, photographer, and landscape painter, Gonzalo Ariza was born in Bogota in 1912. From 1931 to 1935, he studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes where he demonstrated an interest for the artistic currents of the time: Cubism, Surrealism, and Social Painting, which was influenced by the Mexican muralist movement. And offspring of this latter movement was the Bachué group, which led Ariza to create a production with indigenous and traditional themes that addressed social issues.

In 1936 he travelled to Japan where he studied engraving, etching, lithography, and watercolor. It was an education that would forever mark his future work and leave a permanent eastern influence in it. Then he began to render plants, insects, mountains, rivers and the Andean tropical landscape, as he achieved a style of his own that recreated the weather, atmosphere and nature of the diverse regions across Colombia, particularly the savanna of Bogota, the páramo ecosystems and the temperate zones. Master Gonzalo Ariza died in Bogota In 1995, as if he had just walked through one of his renowned foggy landscapes.