In 1964, the Colombian sculptors Edgar Negret and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar staged the two-man show Neoclásicos at the Galería 25 in Bogotá. The exhibition would establish their reputation as the so-called “group of two”: pioneering figures in the history of Colombian abstraction, and of Colombian modernism more generally. It would also cement the opposition between these abstract artists and Fernando Botero’s particular model of realism, setting up what art critic Marta Traba would later refer to as the two extreme lines of Colombian painting. Ana Franco’s Neoclásicos takes its title from the exhibition, and it is the exhibition and its historical importance in the history of Colombian art that connect the book’s two protagonists. Nevertheless, this is arguably not a book about Colombian art; indeed, very little of it takes place in Colombia at all. While the consecration of abstraction as the “the official language of artistic modernity in Colombia”...
University of California Press