Ante la imagen

2009 - Photography (Photography)

Oscar Munoz

location: Cali, Colombia
year born: 1951
gender: male
nationality: Colombian
home town: Popayán, Colombia

In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person. Since a photograph is fixed, it cannot encapsulate the spirit of someone who is gone. Muñoz etched onto the surface of a mirror an appropriated historical image, a daguerreotype from 1839. The viewer sees themselves as well as the subject, the chemist Robert Cornelius. The image is always changing, decaying, in a metaphor for life.


Óscar Muñoz is regarded as one of Colombia’s most important artists, recognized for creating an outstanding body of work over the past three decades in a country troubled by civil war and drug-related violence. He is also the cofounder of Lugar a Dudas (Room for Doubt), a vital art space for activating critical thinking and providing cultural exchange in Cali, Colombia. He is not formally trained in photography, but likes the medium for its capacity to illustrate the transformations of unstable materials such as charcoal, sugar, coffee, and breath. Muñoz is concerned with presence and absence, forgetting and remembering, and acts of engraving and impression. The physicality of the impression is a metaphor for the moment when a memory becomes fixed in the mind. Produced in the context of Colombia, in a culture of disappearance, his work is a profound metaphor for the human experience of life and death.


Colors:



Related works featuring themes of: » Andes Region, » Collective History, » Contemporary Participation, » Film/Video, » Colombian  
» see more

Metaphors of the presence or conversations at the speed of light
© » KADIST

Nicolás Paris

2012

Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...

Primero Estaba el Mar
© » KADIST

Felipe Arturo

2012

Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement...

Tierra
© » KADIST

Regina José Galindo

2013

In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial...

Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido)
© » KADIST

Claudia Joskowicz

2015

Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido) is a single-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz that features the Mexican legend of the Weeping Woman (La Llorona) as its main protagonist...

Other related works, blended automatically  
» see more

Metaphors of the presence or conversations at the speed of light
© » KADIST

Nicolás Paris

2012

Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...

Primero Estaba el Mar
© » KADIST

Felipe Arturo

2012

Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement...

Los rastreadores
© » KADIST

Claudia Joskowicz

2014

Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez...

Related works sharing similar palette  
» see more

buZ Blurr, One Telling of the “Origin Story” at Straat Museum Amsterdam
© » BROOKLYN STREET ART

buZ Blurr, One Telling of the “Origin Story” at Straat Museum Amsterdam | Brooklyn Street Art BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY In the shifting culturescapes of urban contemporary art, STRAAT Museum’s latest exhibition, “Moniker: An Origin Story,” emerges as a poignant narrative that bridges the transient heritage of hobo monikers with the vibrant pulse of today’s street art scene...

Counsel for the month ahead.September 2018
© » EVEN MAGAZINE

Contemporary Muslim Fashions de Young Museum, San Francisco Opens September 22 On September 13, New York state will hold its primaries for the midterm elections, and on the Democratic ballot for governor is Cynthia Nixon: longtime activist, early supporter of mayor Bill de Blasio, and actor...

Lea Rasovszky – Dig the Inbetween book launch
© » THE RE:ART

Lea Rasovszky - Dig the Inbetween - The re:art Lea Rasovszky – Dig the Inbetween book launch On March 17th, 2017, Lea Rasovszky launched her book Dig the Inbetween, a collaboration with graphic designer Larisa Sitar and curator and art critic Diana Marincu , together with a one-night only exhibition at Mobius Gallery in Bucharest...

Idir
© » KADIST

Carole Douillard & Babette Mangolte

2018

Following Bruce Nauman’s seminal performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967) – which sees the artist carefully trace a small delimited area of his studio exaggerating the movements of his hips as he places one foot in front of the other – Idir reproduces these performative gestures in Algiers, Algeria...

Ponderosa Pine IV
© » KADIST

Rodney Graham

1991

Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...

Medellín-New York
© » KADIST

Miguel Angel Rojas

2011

In his paper-based work, Medellin-New York , Rojas uses coca leaves and dollar bills to spell out the words of the two cities, tied together through the illicit exchange of materials used to make the word, gesturing towards the uncomfortable reality of the drug trafficking trade and the complicity of both America and Colombia within that economic system....

Nadie sabe de la sed con que otro bebe (No one knows the thirst with which another drinks)
© » KADIST

Nicolás Consuegra

2012

A residency program in the blazing hot city of Honda, Colombia, inspired artist Nicolás Consuegra to consider the difficulty in understanding the needs of a distant community...

Colombia
© » KADIST

Nicolás Consuegra

2014

Consuegra’s Colombia is a mirror made in the shape of the artist’s home country—a silhouette that has an important resonance for the artist...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
» see more

Residencia Milan 1
© » KADIST

Juan Araujo

2010

Residencia Milan 1 is a painting of a house surrounded by lush forest...

Exquisite Eco Living (executive Properties series)
© » KADIST

Vincent Leong

2012

The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...

Made in Heaven
© » KADIST

Mark Leckey

2004

In Made In Heaven , we are face to face with a sculptural apparition, a divine visitation in the artist’s studio...

The Golden State
© » KADIST

William E. Jones

2000

His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training...