Libretas de dibujos: reencuentros de memoria gráfica"Sketchbooks: Graphic Memory Reencounters"

On October 19, the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango inaugurated the exhibition titled Libretas de dibujos: reencuentros de memoria gráfica "Sketchbooks: Graphic Memory Reencounters" curated by Beatriz González and Verónica Uribe. The exhibition will remain open until June 18, 2018. All the works included in the curatorship belong to the Colección de Arte del Banco de la República and to the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango. The show features works created as far back as the 19th century to this day. The sketchbooks become intimate and everyday elements. The details included in them are instruments of memory and, in some instances, they are even educational. The exhibition was thematically divided into three segments: Scientific Sketchbooks, Travel Journals, and Artists' Sketchbooks. The Scientific Sketchbooks are used particularly to detail scientific research or discoveries. The show includes two such sketchbooks by Santiago Cortés that are important because of the new and detailed geographical, botanical, and entomological discoveries that they contain. The Travel Diaries are a memory resource used by individuals during travels across Colombia. While not necessarily artists' or scientific tools, they often contain elements from both. Some of the travel journals included in the exhibition are by María Gutiérrez de Alba and Alberto Urdaneta, among others. The Artists' Sketchbooks are sketching journals that often contain the most preliminary stages of works that made their authors well-known. They include those by artists like José María Espinosa, Carlos Valenzuela, Francisco Antonio Cano, Fídolo Alfonso González-Camargo, Roberto Páramo, and Rafael Tirado. The exhibition also features some single pages by 20th century artists like Débora Arango, among others, and two sketchbooks by Enrique Grau. The show also delves into the way in which this idea of the sketchbook has been developed by artists like Matéo López and Nicolás Paris.