Ana Mercedes Hoyos, regarded as one of the most tenacious and original painters of the 20th century in Latin America, was born in 1942 in Bogotá. The daughter of an engineer with a passion for architecture, she was instilled with an interest in museums and art history from a young age. Ana Mercedes pursued her studies in Fine Arts at two of Colombia's universities, Universidad de los Andes and Universidad Nacional, laying the groundwork for a life dedicated to painting.
From the beginning, she developed a distinctive color palette that became key to understanding the formal construction of her work. Throughout her career, she acknowledged four major influences: Edward Hopper, Giorgio Morandi, Josef Albers, and Claude Monet. From these masters, she adopted nuances that she would later use to develop her unique language, characterized by a synthetic style, rigorous precision, the square as a structural element, and an exploration of the formal aspects of color, which directed a very compelling line of work in her evolution.
Her painting was influenced by both the psychological and geographical experiences of her native Bogotá, a city filled with dualisms and dichotomies, marked by a unique air, sky, and light that suggest vastness, yet surrounded by mountains that evoke a sense of retreat. This interplay between introversion and extroversion, where the inward gaze becomes apparent, served as a starting point for Hoyos as both a human being and an artist, to speak of another existence.
Her series, "Atmósferas" (1978), logically followed from a process the artist began in 1969 with her "Ventanas" series. This earlier work played with increasingly schematic and, therefore, more abstract painting, where the power to interpret and express through painting became ever more evident. In "Atmósferas," the concept of the window persists in space and distance, yet transcends it by confronting an undefined area of lights and reflections with oil paint, focusing on the square's proportions as a structural framework.
Ana Mercedes Hoyos could be considered a painter of series, creating works that are understood collectively. In "Atmósferas," the outside space becomes light, an ambiguous part of the landscape of her native Bogotá, where an ostensibly white sky emerges through surfaces entirely covered by soft, sunny colors, introducing an abstract and unreal quality. She moves beyond the window frame to explore the exterior space in countless layers of diluted colors absorbed by white, which only become visible through contemplation and stillness, sensations evident in her paintings, along with feelings of mystery, emptiness, and solitude.
Ana Mercedes Hoyos' painting is compelling in its pictorial and aesthetic arguments, effectively translating the essence of her experiences and surroundings into a visual language that invites the viewer into her unique perspective.