Ana Mercedes Hoyos

Ana Mercedes Hoyos is a Colombian painter. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, on September 29, 1942. She attended elementary and high school at the Marymount School in Bogota. During high school she took private painting lessons with Luciano Jaramillo, her father cultivated in her an interest in museums and art history. She entered the Universidad de los Andes to study plastic arts, continued her studies at the Universidad Nacional de Bogotá, but did not graduate from either to devote herself to painting.

In 1966 Hoyos began to exhibit. Her works were very close to the pop movement. She began her work with a series of billboards, urban landscapes and oil buses that were characterized by strong colors.

From 1969 onwards she produced what some considered one of her most important paintings: the series Ventanas (Windows). This project is in small format, square, in which vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines frame a nebulous abstract landscape, and where her interest in the investigation of color variations and oil transparencies is evident; this series inspired abstract paintings which she called atmospheres.

Hoyos has a representative mark: her works have very vivid, almost flat, strong colors. From 1987 onwards she made a series of figurative works with national motifs, Bodegones de Palenque, based on the platones of the fruit sellers of Cartagena, and a series of Papagayos. This Colombian artist held a large number of solo exhibitions, among which stand out those at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá in 1976, and “Ana Mercedes Hoyos, un decenio 1970-1980”, at the Centro Colombo Americano in Bogotá, in 1981.

Ana Mercedes Hoyos passed away at the Clínica Fundación Santa Fe in the Colombian capital on September 5, 2014. The Ministry of Culture also regretted in a statement the death of an artist it considered “a great reference for the visual arts in the world”. She also emphasized the immense artistic legacy that Hoyos leaves behind after half a century of artistic career.