Destrudo Substrato Medellin
Federico Ovalles exhibit @ the Alliance Française of Medellin. Curated by Nydia Gutierrez
2 Dec 2021 - 28 Jan 2022
Federico Ovalles was born in Caracas in 1972. During the seventies and eighties, the decades of his growth and artistic training, the city simultaneously witnessed the successes and weaknesses of the promises of modernity.
On the one hand, since the 1950s a large group of Venezuelan artists -from Paris- had taken on with vigor, and much added originality, the avant-garde tendencies affiliated with the experimentation of the European metropolis. But also in that period Caracas was already beginning to witness the failure of those dreams that, on the other hand, can be seen as dreams close to those cherished by many Latin American cities, including Medellín.
Also in artistic events —in the popularity of the various forms of abstractionism— a path advanced that took geometric abstraction to the unusual circuit of boom, popularity, officialization to the point of monumentalization... and disenchantment. From there arises the work of Federico Ovalles, in whose context he appears destroyed, developed mostly in Medellín for this exhibition.
Nydia Gutierrez
curator
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