The exhibition Confluences encompasses 4000 years of Abstraction in South American art , bringing together the works of a group of modern and contemporary artists whose careers spanned the 20th and 21st centuries, namely Joaquin Torres Garcia, Álvaro Gómez Campuzano, Fernando Coco Bedoya, Anita Payró, Alejandro Puente, Candelaria Traverso, and Augusto Ballardo. These artists all shared a reverence for Pre-Columbian Andean arts and their artworks reflect its power to inspire bodies of work rooted in its ancient abstraction and its spiritual depths. In each artist we can view a contemporary response to this archaic alternative reality.
The textile arts of the ancient Pre-Columbian Andes are not well known, but made a significant contribution to the world’s artistic heritage. These mainly female anonymous artists would have been aware of their relationship with the cosmos, as shown in their deities and everyday natural forces. These textiles were conceived and executed in reverence to the divine, and in turn were thought to bring a divine response to their invocations. In the textiles' glowing and heavenly colours and vibrant primordial abstracted symbolism, we can sense a profound faith, above the range of normal human consciousness.
These mostly female textile artists were part of a continuous 8,000 year tradition, engendering a technical virtuosity and inspired iconography rarely surpassed in world visual culture. In terms of the application of materials, composition and artistic expression pregnant with meaning, these creations resonate with the viewer today, as they did with these South American artists, who rediscovered them within the last century. They have followed an aesthetic trajectory based on their ancient indigenous heritage, rather than simply absorbing dominant Western conventions.