The controversy stirred up by the decision to organize the VII Salón Atenas around the themes of young, experimental art, and Conceptualism is addressed in the introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition VIII Salón Atenas written by the art critic and curator Eduardo Serrano Rueda. In the author’s view, critics in Colombia are polarized: one faction is reactionary (they advocate the poetics of modern art), while the other supports the avant-garde. Serrano lists the arguments expressed by the leading critics in the country on the subject of the VII Salón Atenas event, discussing each one with biting sarcasm. He describes Marta Traba, Francisco Gil Tovar, and Germán Rubiano Caballero as “retardant figures,” and chides Álvaro Barrios and Alberto Sierra for their insatiable avant-garde aspirations. He denounces Miguel González and Lucila González, and even the trade magazine Re-Vista del arte [Art Re-View] and Latin American architecture for their regionalist leanings. Overall, this essay is a caricature of the tensions existing between supporters of modern and contemporary art in Colombia, expressed from Serrano’s very personal point of view.

The curator Eduardo Serrano Rueda (b. 1939) was one of the most controversial critics in the Colombian art world in the 1970s and 1980s. He promoted contemporary art and supported generations of emerging artists during this period.

His introduction to the exhibition VIII Salón Atenas underscores the tensions implicit in his critical work and barely conceals his likes and dislikes among other critics operating in Colombia at the time. This essay also sheds light on the complex process of consolidation of contemporary art during the transitional period of the country, from the 1970s to the 1980s.

The Salón Atenas (also known as the November Salon) was an annual exhibition directed by Eduardo Serrano Rueda, who at the time was the curator of the Museo de Arte Moderno [Museum of Modern Art] in Bogotá, through a program of grants awarded to young artists (under thirty years of age) to create works that would then be exhibited. The artists featured at the eighth and penultimate edition of the Salón Atenas were: Daniel Castro (b.1960), Luz Elena Castro (b. 1955), Consuelo Gómez (b. 1955), Ricardo Gómez (b. 1954), David Izquierdo (b. 1959), Karen Lamassonne, from New York (b. 1954), María Evelia Marmolejo (b. 1958), Nadín Ospina (b. 1960), Jorge Pachón (b. 1954), and Santiago Uribe (b. 1958). 

The nine Salóns Atenas, presented from 1975 to 1984, launched the careers of several notable contemporary Colombian visual artists, including Miguel Ángel Rojas (b. 1946), Antonio Caro (b. 1950), Rosemberg Sandoval (b. 1959), and Nadín Ospina, among others.