When Germán Páez Morales arrived at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in 1980, he found a fragmented panorama of the arts; on one hand the Salón Nacional de Artistas, and on the other the city's limited museum spaces, which were almost impossible to access.
When Germán Páez Morales arrived at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in 1980, he found a fragmented panorama of the arts; on one hand the Salón Nacional de Artistas, and on the other the city's limited museum spaces, which were almost impossible to access.
The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo already had a 14-year history and had established events such as the Salón de Agosto and the Salón del Fuego, along with a series of exhibitions by national and foreign artists, mainly from Mexico and Venezuela, during the 1970s.
Germán Páez Morales sought advice and appointed an advisory board that included Germán Rubiano Caballero, Francisco Gil Tovar, Eduardo Serrano, Jaime Duarte French, Galaor Carbonell, Celia de Birbraher, Antonio Grass, Diken Castro, Maruja Vieira, and Maria Cristina Iriarte, who, drawing on their knowledge and connections in the field, nominated or reviewed the proposals of the emerging artists who would take part in the Salón.
This was not a salon with prizes; it was a salon by invitation, organized personally by the museum's director after study and consultation with the aforementioned advisory committee; this methodology brought an impartiality, objectivity, and openness that other salons lacked, in addition to guaranteeing the quality of the formative, technical, and conceptual processes of those who took part over its 12 years of existence.
In the context of the 1980s, when sharp breaks within modernity marked the consolidation of contemporary processes—and although, due to the cultural orbit we lived in, they reached us only in trickles—there is no doubt about the role played by the Salón de las Nuevas Expresiones Plásticas in the visual territory that was opening up in universities, academies, biennials, and art fairs.
In perspective, those who were part of this Salón are today active in the different dimensions of the cultural field, such as training, creation, circulation, research, and appropriation. Their contributions are visible in new generations of visual artists, in private and public cultural management, in the consolidation of new artistic practices, in heritage appropriation, and in research into the discourses of art and culture, art criticism, and cultural journalism.
This curatorial project, carried out by Guillermo Vanegas, winner of the historical curatorship award convened by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and the
The exhibition, which opens Saturday, July 5 at 2:00 pm, includes works in photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, cartography, video, and object assemblage.
Gustavo Ortiz
Director