Banco de la República presents its Online Art Collection

With this project, Banco de la República makes a large digital museum available to all Internet users, and a complete tool for researchers, allowing them a detailed appreciation of its artworks, access specialized writings, see videos, program visits and learn the latest news about the country's most complete art collection. The Banco de la República collection began in 1957 and today includes more than 5000 works by representative Colombian, Latin American, and international artists of the last 500 years. It is one of Colombia's most important collections and has a year-round acquisition program. The Banco de la República museums in which the collection is exhibited permanently present first-rate international shows, retrospectives of Colombian artists, national curatorships of the work of younger artists, and exhibitions based on research made in the collection, and have a space for new media experimentation. In parallel to all that, the Bank's 29 cultural institutions across the country present traveling exhibitions, educational programs, and community art programs. The collection has a permanent exhibition which, based on eight curatorships, reviews the history of Colombian art and its connections with international art, exhibiting nearly 800 works in various formats. It can be visited with free admission at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República and at the Casa Republicana of the Luis Ángel Arango Library in Bogotá. Since 2013, the collection is presented in a new exhibition based on five independent curatorships, with more than 800 works by 250 artists, dating from the Fifteenth century through the Twenty First. Occupying 16 galleries, the proposal prompts dialogs between Colombian and International art, and confronts works from different historical periods in order to establish thematic and aesthetic connections between them. The chronological but non-linear arrangement is an invitation to converse with Colombian art in its many contexts. The main characteristic of the project of the Online Collection is the possibility of navigating the more than 5,000 woks that are part of the Banco de la República Art Collection, manipulating them as needed to study their detail and their technical particulars. Searches can be filtered in different ways, be it by author, century, or school, or by keyword. "A Look at the Collection", one of the page's sections, presents the 50 most emblematic works of Colombian art featured in the Collection. For instance, Andrés Santa María's portraits; Violencia, by Alejandro Obregón; early works by Fernando Botero, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, and Enrique Grau; and contemporary artists like María Fernanda Cardoso. The page also included texts, videos, and audios of the five curatorships that currently shape the collection's permanent exhibition in Bogotá. There are also academic papers and news about the works, as well as information on new acquisitions, temporary shows, the "Artwork of the Month", and educational programs for different audiences. "Banco de la República's collecting efforts have been ceaseless, seeking above all to preserve Colombia's cultural legacy and to bring forth a panoramic view of the arts in the country since Colonial times to the present. This project becomes an invaluable instrument for students, researchers, and art lovers in general, who will now have access to this information source from anywhere in the world", says Sigrid Castañeda, a professional in the Art and Other Collections Unit in Banco de la República. This project, built on a daily basis, is the continuation of a suit of digital resources implemented by the bank's Art and Other Collections U...