For ARTBO 2026, Duque Arango brings together 16 works that seek to sustain a conversation between two generations. On one side, five figures who set the terms of modern Latin American art: Olga de Amaral, Fernando Botero, Alejandro Obregón, David Manzur and Ana Mercedes Hoyos. On the other, three contemporary practices: Alejandra Aristizábal, Ariel Cabrera and Gustavo Vélez, who work from that legacy without repeating it. What unites these artists is a decision about material, upheld by the work of the hand.
The Inherited Terms
Olga de Amaral (Bogotá, 1932) took weaving off the wall and turned it into structure. In Estudio (2017), a polyptych of seven panels in linen, gesso, acrylic and gold leaf, the surface ceases to be a support and becomes architecture and light; Minuta II (2015) distills that same inquiry into the format of a single page. Gold, applied as material rather than color, will return later in the room.
Fernando Botero (Colombia, 1932 – Monaco, 2023) is present in his three registers. Rosalba (1969) sets volume in oil; Woman (1993) carries it into charcoal, graphite and pastel, where line alone must bear the weight of the body; Hand(1976), cast in bronze in Pietrasanta, makes the hand —the instrument of the craft— its subject.
Alejandro Obregón (1920–1992) appears with two approaches to the bestiary of the Caribbean: Sortilegio de luna (1985), in acrylic, and Barracuda (1988), an assemblage of wood and metal that lifts painting off its plane. David Manzur (Colombia, 1929) upholds the classical tradition from the present: Dama de piedra (2023) adds collage to acrylic, and San Jorge, don Jorge y la doncella (1996) reduces the equestrian motif to charcoal and pastel on paper. Ana Mercedes Hoyos (1942–2014) closes this group with Melón (2001), in which the still life becomes an exercise in color and geometry, and Milagros (2013), in bronze, in which Afro-Colombian culture moves from the plane into space.
The Inheritance in Use
The contemporary practices in the selection do not quote these masters: they continue their questions with other materials. Alejandra Aristizábal (Manizales, Colombia, 1987) works fique and copper in Quiet bloom (2025) and Veins of earth(2025); the Andean plant fiber and the metal extend Amaral’s logic —textile as body rather than image— and root it in territory.
Gustavo Vélez (Colombia, 1975) carves Grieta en movimiento II (2024) in statuary Carrara marble and gold. The piece speaks at once to classical sculpture and to Amaral’s gold: two ways for a material associated with value to be placed at the service of form and movement.
Ariel Cabrera (Camagüey, Cuba, 1982) paints Encuentro en el multiverso (2024) and an untitled work from the same year with an attention to tropical light and texture that links him to Obregón, though his subject is another: history told through its minor scenes, with no official pose.
The Common Thread
Seen as a whole, the selection reveals what holds it together. Gold, as material rather than color, in Amaral and in Vélez; bronze in Botero and in Hoyos; fiber in Amaral and in Aristizábal; the hand, literal in Hand and present in every worked surface. Between one generation and the next there is no rupture but a relay: the materials associated with value and permanence —gold, bronze, marble, fiber— remain at the service of form. The gallery’s proposal for ARTBO is also a statement about Latin American art: its modernity was built on craft, and there it continues. The full conversation is on view in the booth throughout the fair.
