As of 2009, this was the most detailed published interview on the work of Johanna Calle (b. 1965), who has been an important artist in Colombia since the last decade of the twentieth century. Besides continuing to be a major artist in Colombia, she has been one of the most radical and influential artists to revive drawing, in her own country, and in Latin America as well. As stated throughout the text, drawing was the medium that allowed Calle to create a work that expresses the problems of the world around her, on which she sharpened her keen eye. At the same time, she included observations that have come from other spheres, such as the world of nature.
This interview was one of the collection published in the book. The purpose of the book was to make a selection of Colombian artists so the reader could look at them as a group. Although they were known as the most representative artists in Colombia at the time, working in different media, never before had they been brought together in a publication that would offer them a common platform. Although the writer was a journalist by profession, based on his comprehensive research for this book, the interviews published here provide a broad perspective on the works of each artist. The idea was to orient the general reader toward artists who had radically updated the artistic parameters maintained in a country such as Colombia, vis-à-vis the international art scene in the early twenty-first century. This being the case, the selection was not based on themes or creative forms. However, based on a general reading of the book content, the reader might [have reason to] think that the unifying factor was the artists’ common interest in Colombia’s sociopolitical problems. It so happened that these were precisely the concerns around which Colombian artists’ work revolved, especially from the 1940s through the early twenty-first century (see also the interview with Óscar Muñoz [doc. no. 855687]).
