In this article, Colombian curator and critic Carolina Ponce de León (born 1957) puts forth her perspective of “the Postmodern” in Colombian art. By means of a list, she describes the art scene of the 1980s in terms of Postmodernism and its specific characteristics: “plurality of languages;” debates surrounding the Italian “trans-avant-garde” formulated by critic Benito Achile Olivo and the renewed importance of “painting”; work created in urban contexts that reflects on urban symbology; decentralization of “ethnocentricity and Western hegemony”; and, finally, revisions of the poetics, as well as the history and criticism, of art.
This article was published in the art section of the newspaper El Tiempo alongside “Símbolos de cambio: ¿Qué paso con el arte en esta década de los ochenta?” [Symbols of Change: What Happened to Art in the Eighties?] [see doc. no. 1082825], in which critic José Hernán Aguilar (born 1952) provides his vision of the eighties. The contrast between the two articles offers a complex overview of Colombian art of the period.
After years of widely recognized work as a curator and critic in Colombia, Carolina Ponce de León moved to New York. In the early eighties, after having lived in Paris and Belgrade as well, she returned to Colombia. She worked in the education department of the Museo de Arte Moderno of Bogotá. As the director of the art department of the Banco de la República, she curated a number of important projects, including Ante América (1992)—organized in conjunction with Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera and Rachel Weiss—and the program Nuevos Nombres (Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, 1985–94). She studied art criticism in Colombia from 1974 to 1994 under the auspices of Colcultura (Colombian Institute of Culture). Since 1989, she has been an occasional contributor to the newspaper El Tiempo, writing art criticism and reviews of shows. She currently lives in San Francisco, California.