#MaríaBerrios

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11th Berlin Biennale: On The Human Condition

An interview by Katerina Valdivia Bruch

The latest issue of the journal On Curating has been published and it includes my interview with the curators of the 11th Berlin Biennale.

“The 11th Berlin Biennale chose to start its activities one year before its opening date. Following a process-based curatorial approach, the team of four curators began its undertaking at the ExRotaprint complex, working in small groups, and involving the locals and the artistic community. The programme includes reflections and discussions around vulnerability, care and solidarity, as well as extractivism, fanaticism and the rise of nationalisms. While a worldwide pandemic has forced us to stop and go back to basics, all these issues have become more urgent than ever. We spoke with the curators on creating sustainable relationships, doing things on a human scale, and the meaning of community in times of the pandemic.” >>

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María Berrio María Berrio’s muses are almost exclusively women. In fact, the only time she incorporated a man (her husband) into one of her intricate collages, she “transformed him into a tiger before the piece was done”. Berrio has nothing against men but she’s more interested in visualising powerful women and the myths that surround them. The Bogotá-born, Brooklyn-based artist swathes Amazonian queens, veiled matriarchs and earth mothers in elaborate patterns, crowns of flowers, small birds and big — but ultimately obliging — cats. In ‘Born Again’ (2015) a towering female figure with a hulking jaguar casually draped over her shoulders emerges This heroine is anointed with a headdress made from blossoms and a dress that appears to be woven from the surrounding vegetation. Three children, one with an immense halo, throng her and she offers a tiny songbird in one extended hand. The central figure, Berrio explains, is one of the many “strong women capable of living in the jungle, capable of showing their beauty and connected to nature, to the animal world, to everything.” ‘Victoria Miro’ in association with ‘The Great Women Artists’ presents a summer exhibition featuring three artists, María Berrio, Caroline Walker and Flora Yukhnovich who rethink traditional genres to touch upon themes of migration, the workplace and the gendered language of painting. The exhibition runs June 7 - July 27, 2019 with a private view Friday June 7, 2019 from 6 - 8pm. #neonurchin #neonurchinblog #dedicatedtothethingswelove #suzyurchin #ollyurchin #art #music #photography #fashion #film #words #pictures #neon #urchin #maríaberrio #collage #artist #brooklyn #Bogotá #animals #mythology #madremonte #japanesericepaper #colombia #thegreatwomenartists #victoriamiro (at Victoria Miro) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxwjfiqgjbq/?igshid=7r949hlelpe6

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María Berrio María Berrio’s muses are inspired in large part by South American folklore and mythology in which women — like Colombia’s ‘Madre Monte’ (‘mother mountain’, or ‘mother of the forest’) — hold sway over the lands that surround them. Each blade of grass or swatch of fur has been rendered from tiny paper cut-outs, pieced seamlessly together. Berrio’s medium of choice is Japanese rice paper. Hundreds of rolls in all patterns and colours are gathered together in buckets, scattered around her studio. The paper is so thin that when it’s applied to canvas with glue each individual bit blends with whatever is next to it. The impression is of a tapestry woven so tightly that edges align without revealing so much as a stitch. And as fragments of pattern come together to form a leaf or a collar, Berrio’s human muses coalesce and become one with their natural surroundings. ‘Victoria Miro’ in association with ‘The Great Women Artists’ presents a summer exhibition featuring three artists, María Berrio, Caroline Walker and Flora Yukhnovich who rethink traditional genres to touch upon themes of migration, the workplace and the gendered language of painting. The exhibition runs June 7 - July 27, 2019 with a private view Friday June 7, 2019 from 6 - 8pm. #neonurchin #neonurchinblog #dedicatedtothethingswelove #suzyurchin #ollyurchin #art #music #photography #fashion #film #words #pictures #neon #urchin #maríaberrio #collage #artist #brooklyn #Bogotá #animals #mythology #madremonte #japanesericepaper #colombia #thegreatwomenartists #victoriamiro (at Victoria Miro) https://www.instagram.com/p/BxwjY9BgQDT/?igshid=1azg7pbqxeh0k

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María Berrio “I was mostly caged; I wasn’t often allowed to go out. So for me, Colombia was a dream of all these paradises I couldn't touch.” - María Berrio, Collage Artist. María Berrio grew up in Bogotá, Colombia in the 1980s and ’90s during the reign of infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar. The oppressive environment for a young Berrio, provoked dreams of the lush natural world that lay beyond her family’s home. Like for Rousseau, a painter whose work Berrio visits regularly at ‘The Metropolitan Museum of Art’ in New York, the jungle came to represent a lost paradise. At her parents’ farm outside the city in Bogotá, Berrio got a taste of the comfort that nature could offer. There she escaped into a veritable ark of animals — cows, rabbits, birds and a whopping 10 St. Bernards. She also forged an unlikely bond with a parrot, which had become her grandfather’s best friend, following the untimely death of her grandmother many years before. Animals show up everywhere in Berrio’s work. They are symbols of strength (in the case of the jaguar), companions and protectors to her muses, or direct extensions of the women themselves. Animals represent more than a lost intimacy with nature —they become stand-ins for unseen aspects of each subject’s identity. ‘Victoria Miro’ in association with ‘The Great Women Artists’ presents a summer exhibition featuring three artists, María Berrio, Caroline Walker and Flora Yukhnovich who rethink traditional genres to touch upon themes of migration, the workplace and the gendered language of painting. The exhibition runs June 7 - July 27, 2019 with a private view Friday June 7, 2019 from 6 - 8pm. #neonurchin #neonurchinblog #dedicatedtothethingswelove #suzyurchin #ollyurchin #art #music #photography #fashion #film #words #pictures #neon #urchin #maríaberrio #collage #artist #brooklyn #Bogotá #animals #mythology #madremonte #japanesericepaper #colombia #thegreatwomenartists #victoriamiro (at Victoria Miro) https://www.instagram.com/p/BxwjSZsg7dC/?igshid=17692qm0dky12