Artists have long recognized the body’s potential to transcend scientific or social expectations, using it as a site of emotion, sensation, imagination, and expression. The exhibition Liturgies of the Body: The Collector’s Gaze, on view at Banco de la República’s Casa Republicana in Bogotá, explores this complexity through a compelling selection of artworks from the Proyecto Bachué Collection, spanning from the 1960s onward.
This period marks a significant chapter in Colombian and global art history. Although mid-20th-century abstraction rose to prominence as a democratic and universal artistic language, it was ultimately the body – both as a visual object and a conceptual anchor – that responded most powerfully to the anxieties of a polarized and war-torn world.
Curated from a private collection by María Victoria Turbay and José Darío Gutiérrez, the exhibition reflects how the body became a central thread in their collecting practice, despite their broader interests in landscape, conceptual art, and photography. Through their gaze, the collector offers a timely and urgent selection: an invitation to reexamine art history beyond dominant narratives, and to consider the body in art as a lens through which to process human crisis, connection, and fragility.
As Spanish theorist Remedios Zafra writes in El entusiasmo, “We know the body is not illusory like the one drawn on a screen, or killed by an illusory weapon on screen. We know the body rises light when it rejoices. That when it grieves, it weighs as if dragging the burden of the past clinging to the bones.” This poetic reflection guides the viewer through the exhibition’s rooms, which unfold as a corporeal inventory of resistance, vulnerability, and transformation.
The journey begins with British artist Keith Arnatt’s self-portrait photograph, in which he stands holding a sign that reads, “I’m a real artist” – a bodily assertion of presence and identity. From there, the exhibition revisits Goya’s haunting Disasters of War, connecting historical violence to Luis Ángel Rengifo’s devastating series of 13 prints on Colombia’s period of La Violencia, in which fragile victims are rendered powerless under brutal systems of oppression.
More than an aesthetic experience, Liturgies of the Body becomes a curatorial statement on the role of private collecting in shaping the country’s cultural memory. It is also part of Banco de la República’s long-standing initiative The Collector’s Gaze, which has previously highlighted collections such as The Legacy of Casimiro Eiger (1995), Hernando Santos’ Critical Eye (2001), The Ganitsky Guberek Collection (2002), and The Maraloto Collection (2011).
The exhibition is structured across ten thematic sections:
- I’m a Real Artist
- The Persistence of Consciousness
- The Monstrous
- The Harvest of the Violent
- Vanitas
- Venus
- The Citizen / The City
- The Sense of Portraiture, Differences and Alterities
- The Expulsion from Paradise
- Desecrations
Each theme interrogates how the body has been represented as a symbol of anguish, resilience, identity, and power. From vanity to violence, monstrosity to memory, these works show how the body remains a field of ongoing resignification – shaped by gaze, power structures, social rituals, and shifting notions of the public and private.
The exhibition focuses particularly on the decades between 1960 and 1980, a period marked by experimentation with new media such as photography, video, and graphic arts. Rather than prescribing a linear route, the show invites the visitor to reflect on the tensions, crises, and contradictions embedded in the body’s visual and symbolic presence.
Ultimately, Liturgies of the Body reminds us that the body is not a fixed entity but a vulnerable, mutable convention – subject to regulation, belief systems, cultural norms, and even weather. And in its many forms – tormented, joyful, aged, monstrous, divine – it continues to offer us a mirror for collective memory and shared humanity.
The Banco de la República plays a vital role in democratizing access to culture and the arts in Colombia. By offering free admission to its exhibitions at the city’s largest public library Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango (BLAA), the Casa Repúblicana, Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU), Museo Fernando Botero and Casa de la Moneda, local and foreign audiences can engage with significant national and international art collections, fostering critical reflection, education, and preservation of the country’s cultural heritage. The exhibition opened on June 19, 2025, and runs through March 23, 2026.
Casa Republicana – Luis Ángel Arango Library
Calle 11 No. 4-14, Bogotá.
Monday to Saturday: 8:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Sunday: 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Free admission
