ARTBO 2025: Bogotá
Leon Tovar Gallery excitedly presents an exhibition featuring Luis Hernando Giraldo, Emma Reyes, Álvaro Marín, and Santiago Cárdenas Arroyo—four iconic Colombian modern artists, for ARTBO 2025.
Giraldo discovered his passion for music upon hearing musical students practicing on campus while studying in Bogotá. His love of music and poetry have since become central to his approach to art, and he has described his work as a visual equivalent to prose and stanzas in literature. His rural dreamscapes are dotted with references to Caldean geography and local Paisa culture, with nods to Impressionism and Fauvism. Some of the recurring iconography in his portfolio include flowers, livestock, churchgoers in their Sunday best, the fountain in Pacora’s main square, and San Antonio Mountain located just outside the town limits. He imbues his work with the ‘naive’ or ‘childlike’ qualities associated with unconsciousness through use of continuous narrative, nonlinear perspective and a hypersaturated palette.
Emma Reyes’ childhood was marked by abandonment and poverty, leading her to embark on a series of journeys between Latin America and Europe, particularly in France, where she consolidated her career. There she was influenced by various movements such as post-Cubism, abstract expressionism, new realism, and kinetic art, as well as by a distinctly Latin American worldview that aligned with the thoughts of some of her colleagues and mentors like Diego Rivera. Through her characteristic technique, where from a line that appears to be continuous, she constructs the entire structure of the image or painting, creating forms that curl in on themselves resembling labyrinths, spider webs, and weavings. Her compositions suggest movement and are closely framed to represent life. Her work exhibits an undeniable fidelity to herself, where a language rooted in her personal history is evident.
Marín utilizes geometric structural devices but focuses on chromatic interplay and landscape through an abstracted lens. His visual language, built on layered overlays of color, is deeply influenced by shifts in light throughout the day and by European and Latin American artistic traditions in landscape paintings. His works invite contemplation through their deliberate organization yet evocative compositions.
Santiago Cárdenas has drawn inspiration from a wide range of art historical traditions throughout his prolific career, from the Old Masters to Pop art, all of which help create enigmatic still lifes of everyday objects. Known for his exacting realism, Cárdenas uses illusion not to deceive, but to evoke a sense of presence. Rather than offering a window into another space, his works confront the viewer directly, challenging conventional relationships between art and observer. Over the decades, Cárdenas’s style evolved to include freer use of color while maintaining his precise technique.
In addition, LT Projects will have a separate booth this year for its inaugural participation in ARTBO as an independent entity from its parent organization, Leon Tovar Gallery. This milestone marks an exciting opportunity to strengthen our mission as pioneers in fostering artists’ careers and supporting emerging collectors.
For this occasion, LT Projects will present an exhibition by artist Juliana Ríos, featuring intimate works that explore landscapes and contemplative studies of the flora and terrain of Villanueva, La Guajira. Through expressive and dynamic depictions of fruit trees and flowers, Ríos immerses the viewer in the rich surroundings of the region, capturing its essence with deliberate detail and sensitivity. These natural elements provide the fundamental backdrop in which her artistic universe unfolds and her subjects exist.
The exhibition will also include portraits of local villagers engaged in their daily lives, depicted through an unbiased lens that invites reflection on themes of religion, family dynamics, death, tradition, and social justice. Despite addressing profound subjects, her work radiates a sense of hope, honesty, and raw authenticity, offering an unfiltered yet deeply human perspective on the realities of her community.
