Pablo Gomez Uribe
Mede Yorker. 2013
Collage
27×35 cm e/o (triptych)
 
Opening Tuesday January 19, 2021
PROXYCO Gallery, 121 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002
 

Being one of the young artists affiliated with the extinct La Oficina gallery, one of the few art galleries established in Medellin, Colombia in the late 1990’s, Pablo Gómez Uribe bartered some of his early pieces with the gallery’s picture framer who used to exchange his service for art pieces by other artists. Since then, an incipient interest to acquire art pieces was part of Gómez Uribe’s professional practice, which today can be called an affective collection. A group of pieces that, without any pretense, has been shaped in a very intuitive way- with the help of his partner, a Colombian cultural manager- through friendship, complicity and comradery among friends and colleagues from different generations within the artistic field in Medellin.

If the soul of a collection is linked to the specificities that draw connections between the pieces it guards, in this particular one there are two main lines that go across the entire group of objects: the history of the city and the history of the local art. They are not synchronous, but definitely inseparable. On a personal and a daily life sphere the artworks in this exhibition shape a cumulus of memories that keep alive the ties of this immigrant couple with the symbolic, cultural, and an affective universe of their hometown. Through some inquiries that act as postcards, this body of works keeps present and vital certain versions of a continuum that is the city of Medellin right in the middle of Kent Avenue in Brooklyn. This exhibition includes pieces made from the second half of the twentieth century up until now, and in some cases they are part of larger projects or research lines of the artists that allow the spectator to go across some benchmarks of the history of modern and contemporary art in Antioquia. All of them are a reflection of the, sometimes unconsciously, vital experiences of the creators, who embody several versions of Medellin.

This exhibition brings together small-format art pieces by 22 artists from three generations: Ethel Gilmour, Juan Camilo Uribe, Luis Fernando Peláez, Jorge Ortiz, Adolfo Bernal, José Antonio Suárez, Beatriz Olano, Libia Posada, Ernesto Restrepo, Jorge Julián Aristizábal, Fredy Alzate, Pablo Gómez Uribe, Alejandro Posada, Carlos Roldan, Carlos Montoya, Camilo Restrepo, Gabriel Botero,  Cesar del Valle, Sebastián Restrepo, Juan Moreno, Simón Ramírez y Liliana García.

This group of artworks is a kind of postcard from Medellin, as it preserves a vital connection, even in its physicality, with that city many miles away south. They have also operated as a compass, helping its custodians to maintain a connection with New York.
The pieces talk about particular experiences, arbitrarily diverse, unrelated, without intention to shape a whole, but by being together, through some affectionate and professional thread, they represent an imprecise space of cultural belonging between the place they enunciate and the place where they are appreciated.

 

— Luisa Villegas G