Gonzalo Fuenmayor
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As the past, present, the exotic and the familiar collide, absurd and fantastic
panoramas arise. I am looking for a viewer who will negotiate his firsthand expectations with my work. My practice has become a never-ending game of hide and seek between drawing, painting, and photography. I consider myself a drawer, and I rely primarily on scale and gesture as a means to examine ideas of dislocation and exoticism. Opulent Victorian chandeliers and elements that are reminiscent of a decadent, colonial past proliferate from banana bunches, alluding to a tragic and violent history associated with the banana trade worldwide. The struggle to imagine cultural specificity is inherent in the intersection of this extravagant seventeenth-and eighteenth-century imagery and the exuberant tropical landscape. With a studio residency at Oolite Arts and support from an Ellie Creator Award, I am completing a series of large-scale charcoal drawings exploring gesture, erasure, and the choreographed ballet between the opposing actions of adding charcoal and then erasing it.
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Gonzalo Fuenmayor (b. 1977, Barranquilla, Colombia) is a Miami-based visual artist known for his monumental charcoal drawings that explore the legacies of empire, ornament, and cultural hybridity. His lush, baroque compositions merge tropical iconography with Western symbols of power—chandeliers, columns, velvet drapery—creating surreal juxtapositions that question notions of identity, exoticism, and historical memory. Fuenmayor’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, including solo shows at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Galería El Museo in Bogotá. His drawings are held in major collections such as the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is the recipient of the 2024 South Arts Southern Prize, a 2022 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the 2020 EFG Latin American Art Award. His first monograph, Tropical Burn (DelMonico Books, 2023), spans over a decade of his practice
