Temporary exhibition – Museum of Modern Art, Medellín. 2020

The work of Martha Ramírez (Bogotá, 1957) is situated at the intersection of painting and photography, transferring to the pictorial plane events and thoughts that arise from the photographic image and are combined with the strokes and gestures of painting. Her work contains the consciousness that in photography there is something fundamental that cannot be registered and in painting there is something essential that cannot be photographed. In this encounter between matter and sensation, charges, forces, corporealities, and resistances appear—a kind of “inner movement” that tries to make visible what is not representable in the images extracted from mass media, historical documents, and personal archives.

Ramírez’s paintings question the corporeality of the human being as a subjective and experienced reality that continually faces internal and external movements. The bodies represented, subjected to endless practices of strength and adaptation, show the efforts that require individual or collective energy for preservation, going after personal achievements, and obtaining food and fulfilling other human needs. In these scenes set in unidentifiable but familiar geographies, the body, in addition to bearing its own weight, carries physical and symbolic signs that reveal the plurality of forces to which it is exposed, be they psychic, spatial, social, or economic.

Similarly, inhabited spaces—uncertain, unstable, or abandoned by state policies—appear as territories and cartographies in transition with porous and fragmented borders. From these notions, the pictorial surfaces that the artist builds –imprecise and abstract– are configured from the accidental, from splatters, fluid strokes, glazes, and superimposed layers of liquid states. These spaces address the idea of emptiness and dislocation: they are places that do not represent the paradise of our dreams or the promised land, but rather a journey through the geography in which we actually live, often with effort. And like any journey it also alludes to the various states of being. 

Martha Ramírez: Countercurrent is an exhibition that brings together the recent work of this artist, selected from three series produced between 2013 and 2021: Contracorriente (Countercurrent), Transición (Transition), and Deriva (Adrift). In them, the material and expressive potential of painting is updated, denoting a journey of tensions and encounters between being and the place where it happens, experienced by bodies and territories under the unfinished promise of unification.