María Isabel Arango: “Home, sweet Home”

September 15 – October 13, 2007

Casas Riegner Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Hogar, dulce hogar” (Home Sweet Home), and exhibition by emerging Colombian artist Maria Isabel Arango, which as suggested by the title, is a reflection on the notion of home.

According to Arango, the term “home” designates a livable space that can generate feelings of wellbeing or uneasiness. Through a selection of drawings—combining diverse materials such as graphite, color pencil and oil paint on sanded wood— Arango attempts to manifest the significance attached by each individual to the word “home”. In so doing, the artist portrays gentle and delicate child-like images that nevertheless contain somewhat ambiguous and contradictory characters belonging to a shadowy world so as to represent the variety of feelings generated by the idea of “home.”

The image of the house is a recurrent visual element that prevails throughout the exhibition however, one will find formal variations of the house, alluding to different feelings brought into being by the space inhabited by an individual. Children running away from houses infested with spider web-like threads reference the absence of love in certain homes. The threads also mark vital connections between the artist, her characters and the viewer; they represent the “relationships between characters, their surroundings and the pieces of their own puzzles.”

In “Hogar, dulce hogar” (Home Sweet Home) as in her previous projects, Arango utilizes quiet and non-violent imagery despite investigating an intricate and somewhat disturbing theme. She arrives at these images thanks to an intuitive creative process, through which she attempts to recall scattered fragments of the past.

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