Ana Mercedes Hoyos

Biography

In 1978 the first prize at the National Salon of Visual Artists went to a nearly white painting: layers of colour, each covered by a layer of white, until only light was left. The jury’s decision caused argument. The painter was thirty-five, and her name was Ana Mercedes Hoyos.

She was born on 29 September 1942 in Bogotá, to Ester Mejía Gutiérrez and Manuel José Hoyos Toro. Her father was an architectural engineer and encouraged her interest in the history of art. She finished school at the Colegio Marymount and in the same years took private painting lessons from Luciano Jaramillo. Her parents took her to Europe, Mexico and the United States to see the art of other cultures. She then studied visual arts at the University of the Andes with Jaramillo, Juan Antonio Roda, Marta Traba and Armando Villegas, but did not finish the course.

In 1967 she married an architect, Jacques Mosseri; they spent a month in New York, going round Pop Art exhibitions, and returned to Bogotá. Their daughter Ana was born in 1969.

From 1961 to 1965 Hoyos taught at the University of the Andes. She began to exhibit in 1966; in 1967 she won second prize at the Young Painters’ Biennial of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bogotá, and in 1968 first prize at the exhibition “Environmental Spaces”, organised by Marta Traba at the Museum of Modern Art. In the late 1960s she painted in a Pop Art vein, and in the 1970s she moved to minimalist abstraction. Out of it grew her first series, Ventanas (Windows), which many consider the most important thing she did. These are small square oil paintings: verticals and horizontals frame an abstract landscape, a frozen moment. The window separates inside from outside, and in the later works of the series the image becomes so obscure that one cannot tell whether one is looking into the window or out of it. In 1971 ten paintings from the series won the Caracas Prize at the Salon of National Artists.

By the mid-1970s the Atmósferas (Atmospheres) break through the window: the frame is gone, and what remains is a space of light. It was for these that she won the first prize of the National Salon in 1978. Because of the controversy around it, by one account, Hoyos made New York her second home. She was invited to the Paris Biennale and to the exhibition “Geometria Sensível” at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro.

Flowers and fruit came next. Of the sunflowers she kept almost only the round heads, without petals and without space around them. Then she returned to a window-like frame and painted still lifes of the fruit sold on the beaches of Cartagena: stretched out horizontally, as if the fruit were itself a landscape, with a symmetry built from plantains and watermelons. In 1984–1987 the still lifes became a conversation with art history: she reworked pictures by Caravaggio, Cézanne, Jawlensky, Lichtenstein, Van Gogh and Zurbarán and inserted her own view, mythical and ethnic, into the European tradition. In 1988 Newsweek published an interview with her among artists it called “new teachers”.

Through the still lifes she came to Afro-Colombian heritage. Hoyos studied slavery and its counterpart, the idea of freedom, and photographed and recorded the people of San Basilio de Palenque: the testimony of ordinary people, their knowledge of herbs, legends, games and customs. This produced the cycle for which she is best known: bright, tropical in colour, with exaggerated light, about the people and vegetation of the Caribbean coast.

In 1992 the Japan Foundation invited her to a cultural exchange programme for artists. In 1993 works from the Palenque cycle were shown at the Yoshii Gallery in New York, and in 1996 and 1998 she was exhibited by Louis Stern Fine Arts; the first show was covered by the Los Angeles Times. In 2000 President Bill Clinton invited her to the conference “Culture and Diplomacy” at the White House, and in the same year the University of Antioquia in Medellín awarded her an honorary master’s degree in visual arts. A retrospective of 2004–2005, covering thirty-six years of work, toured Mexico and came to Colombia that summer.

In February 2014 the Nueveochenta Gallery showed her rarely exhibited sculptures in the exhibition “Tres D (3-D)”. In July she arranged for her collected materials on the palenqueros to go to the United Nations University in Tokyo, with a smaller part going to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Ana Mercedes Hoyos died on 5 September 2014 in Bogotá. Her works are in museums in Tokyo, Zaragoza, Mexico City and Roslyn Harbor, and in the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá.