Colombian art

 Colombian art has 3,500 years of history and covers a wide range of media and styles ranging from Spanish Baroque devotional painting to Quimbaya gold craftwork to the "lyrical americanism" of painter Alejandro Obregón (1920–1992). Perhaps the most internationally acclaimed Colombian artist is painter and sculptor Fernando Botero (1932).

Colombian art history is extensive, therefore, here are some periods:

Goldwork

The earliest examples of gold craftsmanship have been attributed to the Tumaco people of the Pacific coast and date to around 325 BCE. Gold would play a pivotal role in luring the Spanish to the area now called Colombia during the 16th century 

One of the most valued artifacts of Pre-Columbian goldwork is the so-called Poporo Quimbaya, a small (23.5 × 11.4 cm), hollow, devotional object (used to mambeo or coca leaf chewing ritual) made of gold whose aesthetic harmony, simple elegance, and mathematical symmetry are striking and almost modern.

The Museo del Oro in Bogotá displays the most important collection of pre-Columbian gold handicraft in the Americas.

 Stone

Roughly between 200 BCE and 800 CE, the San Agustín culture, masters of stonecutting, entered its “classical period". They erected raised ceremonial centres, sarcophagi, and large stone monoliths depicting anthropomorphic and zoomorphhic forms out of stone. Some of these have been up to five meters high.

Related to the San Agustín culture were the inhabitants of Tierradentro (“inner land”, so called because of its inaccessibility) who created over one hundred and fifty underground tombs, or hypogea; their walls and ceilings were richly decorated with geometric forms recalling the interior of palm huts. Also in the tombs were found funeral urns, bowls, and pitchers.

20th Century and modernism

From 1920 to 1940, Marco Tobón Mejía, José Horacio Betancur, Pedro Nel Gómez, Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo , Santiago Martinez Delgado and Alipio Jaramillo produced several mural paintings influenced by the Mexican muralists, with neoclassic features and influences of Art Nouveau. During the 1940s, a raising internacional disinterest in the Colombian art caused to the local artis to try new ways of expression such as post-impressionism and French scholar style. An example of this is the landscape painter Ricardo Gómez Campuzano and his depictions of Cartagena. Several art critics point to the 1950s as the time when Colombian art started to have a distinctive point of view, reinventing the traditional elements under the XX century concepts. Examples of this are the Greiff portraits by Ignacio Gomez Jaramillo, showing what the Colombian art could do with the new techniques applied to typical Colombian themes. Carlos Correa, with his paradigmathic “Naturaleza muerta en silencio” (silent dead nature), combines geometrical abstraction and cubism in a style still recurrent today in many artists. Pedro Nel Gómez, in his “Autorretrato con sombrero” (1941) (self-portrait with hat) shows influences from Gauguin and Van Gogh. He also shows a strong influence of Jose Clemente Orozco in his series about the Barequeras (women extracting gold from the rivers banks) and his self portrait (1949) shows strong influences from Cézanne. Alejandro Obregón is often considered as the father of modern Colombian painting, and one of the most influential artist in this period, due to his originality, the painting of Colombian landscapes with symbolic and expressionist use of animals, (specially the andean condor). In his work is noticeable the influences of Picasso and Graham Sutherland. Currently, some of the most recognized painters in the international scene are Fernando Botero and Omar Rayo.