Ana Mercedes Hoyos (September 29, 1942 – September 5, 2014) was a Colombian painter, sculptor, and a pioneer in the country’s modern art. Over the course of her artistic career, she has received over seventeen national and international prizes. Her career began with a Pop Art style that progressed to abstract, then to cubism and realism as she explored light, colour, sensuality, and the wealth of her surroundings. Her reinterpretations of master painters prompted her to investigate Colombian multiculturalism, and her subsequent works concentrated on Afro-Colombian and mestizo ancestry within the Colombian landscape. Her works can be found in the permanent collections of Tokyo’s Fuji Art Museum; the Ibercaja Collection in Zaragoza, Spain; Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art; Roslyn Harbour, New York’s Nassau County Museum of Art; and Juan Antonio Roda and museums in other Latin American cities. Her archive records on San Basilio de Palenque were given to the United Nations University in Tokyo and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Early years
Her artwork in Jardns de Cap Roig in 2009
Ana Mercedes Hoyos Meja was born in Bogotá, Colombia on September 29, 1942 to Ester Meja Gutiérrez and Manuel José Hoyos Toro. Her father was an architect who urged Hoyos to get a degree in art history. She finished her basic and senior education at Colegio Marymount in Bogotá, where she also took private painting instruction from Luciano Jaramillo. This academic education was supplemented by excursions to Europe, Mexico, and the United States to learn about art in different cultures. She studied visual arts at the University of the Andes alongside Jaramillo, Juan Antonio Roda, Marta Traba, and Armando Villegas, but did not complete her studies.In 1967, she married architect Jacques Mosseri Hané, and they spent a month in New York City examining Pop Art shows before returning to Bogotá. Ana, their daughter, was born in 1969 as a result.
Professional career
Hoyos began her teaching career at the University of the Andes, where she worked from 1961 until 1965. She began showing in 1966 and earned second place in the Young Painter’s Biennial at Bogotá’s Museum of Contemporary Art (Spanish: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá) in 1967. The following year, she won first prize in the “Environmental Spaces” show at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art. She created Pop Art pieces in the late 1960s and by the 1970s, she was working in a minimalist approach, creating abstract works. These events inspired her to create her first series, Ventanas (Windows), which many believe to be her most important work.The oil paintings were small and square in format, with vertical and horizontal lines framing an abstract landscape. The window was a device used to focus the viewer’s attention on a frozen point in time, usually exhibiting a landscape image, with the frame reflecting the division of internal and exterior reality. The framed image grows more indistinct in her later pieces in this series, making it impossible to tell whether one is gazing in or out of the window. Hoyos received the Caracas Prize at the 22nd Salon of National Artists in 1971 for works 1-10 from the Ventanas collection.Hoyos’ series Atmósferas (Atmospheres) breaks through the window by the mid-1970s, and the photos explore the unrestrained expanse of light, abandoning the frame totally. She studied the depths of colour focused in light by painting with alternating layers of diverse colours, each followed by a white layer. Hoyos received first place in the 27th National Salon of Visual Artists for her Atmósferas paintings in 1978, which was contentious due to the extremely competitive nature of the Colombian art scene and ultimately prompted her to make New York City her second home. When she was invited to participate in the Biennale de Paris in an exhibition called “GeometraSensvel,” she gained international exposure.sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, with Roberto Pontual and other Latin American artists.
Hoyos’s next step was a series of floral and fruit pieces in which she removed most of the petals and concentrated on the flower head of sunflowers. By exploring the sensuality of earth’s abundance through simply circular forms, she aimed to erase spatial references in order to focus on the flower itself. From these photos, she progressed to a series of still lifes in which she returned to a window-like photographic frame. Using fruits discovered on Cartagena’s beaches, her body grew oblong, as if the fruit were a landscape in and of itself. She created symmetry by using plantain shapes that were balanced by watermelon and surrounded either slices of fruit or the bounty seen in a fruit vendor’s shop.Between 1984 and 1987, these still lifes evolved into an examination of art history, paying tribute to master artists such as Caravaggio, Cézanne, Jawlensky, Lichtenstein, Van Gogh, and Zurbarán. Hoyos’ study of history placed her own view of magical or mythical and ethnic experience into the European tradition, reworking some of their paintings. She was introduced to North American audiences in 1988 through an interview in Newsweek, which included interviews with artists labelled “new teachers.”
Hoyos grew to embrace Afro-Colombian history through her still lifes, moving from love of the lush bounty to appreciation of the cultural contributions and multicultural diversity of the people who populated Colombia. She began investigating slavery and its inverse, the concept of freedom, in order to comprehend how those historical events impacted and changed Colombia. She began chronicling the history of San Basilio de Palenque through photography and oral interviews, gathering testimonials from ordinary people about their medicinal knowledge, folklore, games, and cultural customs.This investigation into Colombia’s past prompted her to create the series of works on the Afro-Colombian community for which she is most known and for which she received widespread acclaim. To show the Caribbean coastal communities and vegetation, the paintings used exaggerated light and details filled with tropical themes and colours.
The Japan Foundation invited Hoyos to participate in a cultural exchange programme for artists in 1992. The next year, paintings from her Palenque collection were shown at the Yoshii Gallery in New York City. President Bill Clinton invited her to attend the White House seminar on “Culture and Diplomacy” in 2000. That same year, she received an Honoris Causa master’s degree in visual arts from Medelln’s University of Antioquia. A travelling retrospective of Hoyos’ art visited Mexico from November 2004 to March 2005 before moving on to Colombia that summer. The exhibition featured pieces from her 36-year-long series Ventanas, Atmósferas, still lifes, tributes, and Colombian negritude.The artist’s evolution and explosive use of colour and rhythm were shown in chronological order through a variety of styles, including abstract, Pop Art, and realism. Her contemporary approach mirrored both art movements of the time, as well as her artistic commentary on Latin American history through images of mestizos and Afro-Latinos’ multicultural heritage.
Tres D (3-D), a show exhibiting rarely seen sculptural pieces by Hoyos, was held at the Nueveochenta Gallery in February 2014. Her three-dimensional works came next, and they were congruent with the themes represented in her paintings throughout her career. Hoyos made arrangements for her collection of palenqueros artefacts to be donated to the United Nations University in Tokyo shortly before her death in July 2014, with a smaller portion going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which houses the Smithsonian’s collection of African-American history.
Legacy and death
Hoyos died on September 5, 2014, in Bogotá, Colombia, following a brief hospitalisation.[8] In acknowledgment of her contributions, she received over 17 national and international prizes during her career.[9] Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Fuji Art Museum in Tokyo, the Ibercaja Collection in Zaragoza, Spain, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbour, New York, and the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, among other Latin American museums.[8][20]
The Google Doodle was dedicated to Hoyos on December 17, 2022, to commemorate her life and contributions.