The Elvira Moreno Gallery (Bogotá) is participating in Art Basel Miami Beach for the first time in the prestigious Sector Survey, a sector dedicated to challenging conventional artistic canons through research projects that reclaim significant historical artistic practices, presenting the exhibition "The Immemorial: The Transcendence Of Luis Fernando Zapata," dedicated to one of the most visionary and poetic artists in contemporary Colombian art.
The exhibition pays homage to the legacy of Luis Fernando Zapata (1951–1994), whose work constitutes a profound meditation on human fragility, spirituality, and the permanence of memory. Through sculptures, reliefs, and ritual objects created between 1988 and 1994, Zapata conceives art as a space of transition between the earthly and the eternal, intertwining influences from Mesoamerican, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures with a reflection on the body and time.
His practice, developed primarily in Paris during the late 1980s, solidified as an act of aesthetic resistance against the impact of HIV. In dialogue with his life experience, his work becomes a silent manifesto of transcendence: each barge, stele, or sarcophagus stands as
a symbolic threshold —a "door of light" to the immemorial.
The exhibition's title, "The Immemorial," alludes to the concept formulated by Jean-François Lyotard, who defines it as "that which cannot be remembered or forgotten, it is that which returns uncannily." In Zapata's works, matter—paper pulp, natural pigments, and organic objects—acquires a sacred dimension, evoking relics of ancient civilizations and configuring an archaeology of the soul.
This presentation commemorates the 30th anniversary of the artist's death, revisiting works safeguarded for three decades that now resurface as a testament to a sensibility ahead of its time. The work of Luis Fernando Zapata is part of prestigious institutional collections, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid), the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York), the Banco de la República Museum (Bogotá), and the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO), as well as prominent private collections in the Americas, Europe, and Latin America.
At a time when contemporary art revisits notions of ritual, body, and spirituality, Zapata's work acquires a luminous relevance, revealing art's capacity to endure as a testament to the human soul.
