VICKY NEUMANN. Rearranging Home

The Fernando Pradilla Gallery presents a new exhibition by Colombian artist Vicky Neumann (Barranquilla, 1963), featuring a collection of paintings created between 2023 and 2025. Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Barranquilla, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (France), the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome (Italy), and Marymount College in Virginia (United States), Neumann has developed a body of work characterized by an emotional and dynamic style that blurs the traditional boundaries of the canvas. Her work is a constant balance between destruction and reconstruction, combining chaos and harmony within a single artistic dimension. Her distinguished career has established her as one of the most representative artists on the current Colombian art scene.

For her figurative paintings, she uses a variety of materials such as oil, acrylic, enamels, and spray paint, combining them with unconventional ones like fabrics, scraps, and recycled materials. She also develops a three-dimensional body of work composed of ceramic-based sculptures and found objects such as fragments of dolls and household items.

For this exhibition at the Fernando Pradilla Gallery, Neumann presents a series of medium and large-format canvases that reflect the artist's artistic and theoretical interests, and above all, the influences she has received. Trained in the 1980s—a decade in which painting returned to the forefront of contemporary art in response to the Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 1970s—her training in Europe allowed her to come into contact with movements that, at that time, were the leading figures in contemporary art. These included German Neo-Expressionism, with artists of the stature of Baselitz, Hödicke, and Kiefer, and the Italian Transavantgarde, spearheaded by Clemente, Chia, and Cucchi. In Spain, the return to painting was led by artists such as José María Sicilia, Menchu ​​Lamas, and Campano, while in Colombia, the Neo-Figuration movement of the 1980s featured figures like Beatriz González and Óscar Muñoz. These are the references of Neumann, who seeks in his artistic research new forms through which to give meaning and relevance to painting.

Neumann's work is full of references to the New Realism of female artists, such as Nicky de San Phalle, whom she nods to in her sculptures of found objects and the use of materials traditionally associated with the feminine sphere, such as sewing supplies or even dresses. San Phalle's iconic piece, The Bride, comes to mind when we contemplate Neumann's canvas titled Little Red Dress or Everything I Didn't Do, a nostalgic, feminist reflection through a torn and splattered flamenco dress. This title allows us to establish a link with some of the characteristic themes in Vicky Neumann's work: memory, the passage of time, and the role of women in Latin America.

In one of her most recent projects, The Very Long Hours of Clementina Palacios, the artist takes as her point of reference the Book of Hours of the Duke of Berry from the 15th century. The project is a reflection on the sewing work of her assistant, Clementina, on the passage of time, on the biography of her and her family, slaves of African origin, and their integration into the social and political community of present-day Colombia.

In the canvases Vicky Neumann presents in the exhibition Rearranging home, we find scenes of domestic interiors that evoke an atmosphere of the past, suggesting memories of the artist's childhood. The furniture, objects, and paintings that decorate the rooms unfold before our eyes like objects erased by time. The painting technique is based on the superposition of pictorial planes and the dragging of paint in certain areas of the canvas. These areas of "draggling" seem to suggest scenes of "information erasure" that allude to scenes of phantasmagoria and illusionism. The human figures represent young women sleeping or cradling babies in their laps; the male figure appears seated in an armchair, observing. Also interesting is the representation of the "painting within a painting"; these domestic rooms are decorated with paintings typical of bourgeois decor, such as landscapes and
still lifes.

The superimposition of images and their unexpected encounters have served artists, first in Surrealism and later in its successor, New Realism, to provoke reflection in the viewer on the meaning of what we see. Images of the everyday are described through painting, patchwork, and scraps.

Vicky Neumann's works become compositions that incorporate cut canvases, fragments of other paintings that are reconfigured on the canvas surface to generate new interpretations of what we see.

Neumann refers to her paintings in the following way: “After a period of pessimism, a vindication of painting: risk, rhythm, colour, composition, drama, contradiction, and life, despite everything. I propose an aesthetic straddling damage and repair, discouragement and hope, dream and wakefulness. An idealized world, broken, patched up with simple, necessary, contaminating, and, in its own way, beautiful elements.”

Her work is part of important international collections, including the Delaware Art Museum, United States; the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California; the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá; and the Museum of Caldas, Manizales. In 2018, the Rayo Museum in Roldanillo, Valle del Cauca, held a retrospective of her work titled Vicky Neumann. In 2017, she exhibited her most recent works in the show Altered Domestic at the El Museo Gallery in Bogotá, and in 2012 she presented the exhibition Vicky Neumann at the Caldas Art Museum in Manizales, Colombia.