COLOMBIA
Debora Arango
Monsignor García Benítez was about to excommunicate Débora for this painting, he called her to his office to prohibit her from painting more nudes. Débora asked if he had already called out Pedro Nel Gómez, who also painted nudes. Monsignor justified him for being a man to which the artist said that she did not know that there were sins of men and sins of women.
Débora Arango worked the nude naturally. Her work is the gaze of women on women. It exposes the body and the soul through a realistic, critical and testimonial work. It displaces maternal femininity towards a more sexual plane, and revolutionizes with that expressionist and figurative style that characterizes it so much.
Débora was a full-fledged artist. Her academic training and constant discipline produced even harsher censorship of her paintings.
She was inspired by everyday life. She rummaged in the brothel, in the solitude of the naked, the exposed sex. The prostitute was always the character of Débora Arango. "A nude is nothing but nature without disguises, as it is, as the artists should see them: a nude is a landscape in human flesh."
Adolecencia, Debora Arango, 1939.
Ana Mercedes Hoyos
Ana Mercedes Hoyos was a Colombian painter and sculptor.
She studied plastic arts, with professors such as Juan Antonio Roda, Luciano Jaramillo, Armando Villegas and Marta Traba; later she went to the National University of Bogotá, but did not graduate from either of the two to devote herself to painting. Hoyos began exhibiting in 1966. And she was awarded the first prize at the XXVII Salón Nacional de Artistas de Colombia with the Ventanas series, which for some includes her most important paintings. This series evolved into more abstract paintings, which the artist calls atmospheres: very light surfaces, generally close to white, with almost imperceptible tonal variations.