Leon Tovar Projects is pleased to present the debut exhibition of our newly represented artist, Juliana Ríos Martínez. This exhibition brings together a selection of her most emblematic works, spanning different moments of her distinguished artistic career.
Juliana Ríos is a Colombian visual artist whose work delves into the construction of identity and collective imaginaries, offering a critical reflection on mestizaje and cultural memory. Born in Armenia, Quindío, with maternal Indigenous roots from La Guajira, her artistic practice is deeply rooted in the territory, where provincial dynamics and social, cultural, and political tensions become the axis of her compositions.
Her pictorial work is distinguished by the depiction of anachronistic scenes that seem suspended in time, where provincial life is captured through an intimate lens. These images, which combine a realist language with atmospheres charged with visual poetry, engage in dialogue with the legacy of European pictorial tradition—influenced by figures such as Berthe Morisot, Marie Bracquemond, Eva Gonzalès, and Mary Cassatt—to project a contemporary reading deeply rooted in the Colombian Caribbean.
Ríos Martínez’s work transcends the anecdotal; it appropriates social realism to address structural issues such as child motherhood, migration, and limited opportunities in the region while reflecting on the dynamics of family, death, and tradition. Her imagery also reconfigures mestizaje as a conscious cultural process, proposing a rereading of the territory through painting and establishing a dialogue between representation and the context from which it originates.
Influenced by the work of Francisco de Goya and the narrative depth of Gabriel García Márquez, Ríos Martínez incorporates elements of magical realism into her work, achieving a fusion between the everyday and the symbolic, the intimate and the universal. Her creative process, marked by a rigorous exercise of observation, turns each canvas into a surface for reflection on the transformation of matter and time—essential themes underlying her production.
Through a painting style that aligns with contemporary Impressionism, her work offers a critical and aesthetic perspective on peripheral realities, where pictorial tradition converses with contemporary imaginaries to question and revalue the spaces, stories, and people she portrays. Thus, Juliana Ríos Martínez consolidates a proposal that, from its regional singularity, challenges the global narratives of art.
