A decade in the past, the Colombian artwork market was at its peak. The nation’s marquee truthful, Artbo, had double the gallery numbers that it has now. In every single place you turned, it appeared clear that “Colombia was having a second”. However the truthful, created and led by the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce, has confirmed itself remarkably resilient and in a position to evolve although, within the phrases of Paula Bossa, the director of the native gallery Casas Riegner, “Colombia’s artwork market is sophisticated.”
This week’s twenty first version of Artbo (till 28 September) is framed by two vital occasions. First, the inaugural Bogotá Biennial, Ensayos sobre la Felicidad (till 9 November), which took over the Colombian capital the weekend earlier than the truthful, provides vital motivation for worldwide collectors and museum curators to journey to the town. Second, a altering of the guard on the truthful itself: after a decade underneath the management of María Paz Gaviria, the daughter of a former Colombian president, the truthful is now led by a director of a youthful era, Jaime A. Martínez.
Martínez, an artwork historian and former gallerist who beforehand lived and labored in Berlin, is prioritising high quality and discovery. “Artbo may be very elegant and I attempt to keep that feeling, however additionally it is the house to find Latin American and Colombian artwork,” Martínez tells The Artwork Newspaper.
The 2025 version of Artbo Courtesy Bogotá Chamber of Commerce
The home artwork market continues to be in flux as a result of lingering results of the 2023 peso devaluation and inflation, shifting political landscapes and post-pandemic changes. And the truthful is going on at a time when the worldwide artwork market itself is present process a structural disaster. But Artbo, with its loyal contingent of native and worldwide galleries—46 in all—is set to function the important thing platform to help the circulation of Colombian and Latin American artwork.
The São Paulo-based Galeria Vermelho, which has been taking part in Artbo since 2007, is exhibiting works by two artists who’re exhibiting monumental works within the Bogotá Biennial, the Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca and the Argentine artist Ivan Argote. Inside the first hours of the truthful opening to VIPs on Wednesday (24 September), the gallery bought a piece by the Mexican artist Tania Candiani, kind her 2015 Cromatica collection, priced at $18,000, in addition to a chunk from Marcelo Moscheta’s Autopoiesis collection priced at $4,000. The gallery additionally bought a chunk from Garrido-Lecca’s Restauraciones de señal collection, priced at $16,000.
Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Restauraciones de señal: Sensor de temperatura, 2023 Courtesy of Vermelho
“Colombian collectors have an excellent understanding of what we deliver,” says Eduardo Brandão, the gallery’s creative director and co-founder. “They usually need to know extra, are cautious and demanding too.”
For Brandão, the difficulties of importing materials to Colombia and coping with customs and foreign money conversions are nicely value it—and have truly gotten simpler in some respects. “We used to need to ship by means of Miami,” he says. For his gallery, in relation to Artbo, there isn’t a query: “We now have to do it.”
Methods for a cautious however curious market
The synergy with the brand new Bogotá Biennial and the truthful’s sturdy regional focus translated into instant motion throughout Wednesday’s VIP preview. Inside the first 10 minutes of the truthful’s “First Alternative” champagne hour, SGR Galeria bought a piece for $7,000 by Colectivo Mangle, the duo of María Paula Álvarez and Diego Álvarez, two artists and carpenters who’ve been working collectively since 2006. The home market, nevertheless, stays cautious and, in lots of points, restricted within the variety of collectors and their acquisitions budgets.
“Artbo isn’t an enormous market like Mexico or Miami, however on condition that their programme focuses on the worldwide south, it’s a very fascinating complementary solution to join with Latin American collectors,” says Cesar Levy of Paris’s 193 Gallery, which is taking part within the truthful for the second time this 12 months. Plus, he provides, Bogotá is “such a ravishing metropolis”. By the truthful’s second day, his gallery had bought a piece by the Cuban artist Rafael Domenech for $5,500, a chunk by the Kenyan photographer Thandiwe Muriu for $8,500 and a mixed-media work by the Ivorian artist Joana Choumali for $16,500 {dollars}.
{A photograph} by Thandiwe Muriu on view at 193 Gallery’s stand at Artbo © Thandiwe Muriu, courtesy 193 Gallery
The truthful’s highest-value gross sales usually come from established galleries like New York’s León Tovar, Bogotá’s Casas Riegner, and Paris-headquartered Mor Charpentier. Galleries with a presence each overseas and regionally, comparable to Mor Charpentier (which opened a Bogotá house in 2021), spotlight their strategic dedication to the native ecosystem regardless of its decline over the previous decade. By the early afternoon on the preview day, Mor Charpentier had already bought works by Latin American artists together with Liliana Porter, Mateo López and Guadalupe Maravilla for costs starting from $15,000 to $60,000.
Maravilla, the El Salvador-born artist whose work is influenced by his expertise emigrating to the US and the nation’s immigration insurance policies, “is presently having a significant second with exhibitions at main establishments”, says Philippe Charpentier, the gallery’s co-owner. The gallery additionally opened a solo present of Maravilla’s work (till 29 November) on Thursday evening at its Bogotá house.
Charpentier says the works on the stand at Artbo are strategically priced—between $15,000 and $40,000—“to match the native market dynamics”. The objective for him is evident: to adapt to the native market’s dynamics and nurture the native viewers, which he sees as necessary for the gallery’s long-term viability.
Curatorial threads meld custom and know-how
Amongst Artbo’s strengths are its expansive curated sections, which offer a vital counterpoint to the industrial foremost part, giving collectors a deeper understanding of regional artwork practices. The Proyectos part, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, is titled The Plot of the Future: Modern Practices from Textiles and showcases works by ten artists exploring the essential and artistic potential of fibres and textiles as language, by means of strategies from embroidery to ancestral knotting.
Works by María Sosa and Andrea Monroy Palacios on view in Galería Further’s stand at Artbo Courtesy Galería Further
Among the many part’s highlights is a presentation of works by María Sosa, who will symbolize Mexico at subsequent 12 months’s Venice Biennale. Her work, which is being offered by the Guatemala-based Galería Further, makes use of conventional Mexican textiles to discover themes of colonisation and its impression on girls’s our bodies by means of efficiency artwork. Silvia Obiols, Galería Further’s director, says that inside an hour of the VIP opening considered one of Sosa’s monumental wall textile was already on reserve, including: “They got here in with a mission, they knew what they needed.” The gallery additionally bought 4 works made with banana sap by the Guatemalan artist Andrea Monroy Palacios, together with works positioned with Colombian collectors and worldwide museums, for costs starting from $3,000 to $10,000.
Additionally within the Proyectos sector, the New York-based gallery Henrique Faria Nice Artwork is showcasing the Chilean artist Francisca Rojas, whose work mixes conventional strategies, notably a re-reading of the quipu (an Andean knot-based recording system) linking it with binary laptop language. The gallery bought textile works from that collection and from a brand new, playful collection of female figures to Colombian collectors, with costs starting from $2,500 to $3,500.
The 2025 version of Artbo attests to the Colombian artwork ecosystem’s resilience and adaptableness. Whereas the native market could also be “tremendous difficult”, as Bossa from Casas Riegner places it, the truthful serves as a essential nexus the place native and Latin American abilities can obtain worldwide visibility. With a brand new truthful director and the vitality of the concurrent Bogotá Biennial, the town seems decided to cement its standing as a regional chief in up to date artwork.
Artbo, till 28 September, Agora Bogotá Conference Middle, Bogotá
