This exhibition brings together the work of a select group of artists who played an active role in shaping an experimental and critical visual language that challenged traditional artistic canons and gender roles in Colombian society during the decades following World War II. It stands as a historical acknowledgment of the role that women artists played—both within the countercultural movements and in the national experiments in visual form—during the years in which Colombia entered a process of state modernization to align itself with the postwar development of other Latin American nations.

The show features the work of prominent Colombian women artists from the 1950s through the 1980s, with a focus on their early production—moments of great creative vitality—highlighting the beginnings of their formal explorations, which would later define the contributions of Colombian women to the broader Latin American art scene. Many of the artists represented here are now recognized as seminal figures in Colombian art history, the subjects of significant publications and solo exhibitions in leading international institutions. By presenting well-known names such as Beatriz González, Olga de Amaral, Feliza Bursztyn, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, and Fanny Sanín alongside other artists active during the second half of the twentieth century, the exhibition offers contemporary audiences a panoramic view of the period. These figures are presented as part of a broader cultural landscape in which women artists, as a collective, carved out a space of enunciation from which they actively contested the patriarchal dynamics of national culture through a horizontal dialogue with their male peers.

Following the insights of art historian Linda Nochlin, the privileged position that some of these artists enjoy today is not solely the result of individual achievement. The recognition of “great women artists” has only been possible through the sustained efforts of several generations of women who gradually built the social and institutional conditions necessary to overcome the constraints that had long prevented their talent from flourishing freely. In this sense, it is crucial to acknowledge the pioneering work of Colombian women artists from the first half of the twentieth century who paved the way for their voices to be heard after decades of systematic silencing by dominant cultural institutions—artists such as Margarita Holguín y Caro (1875–1959), Carolina Cárdenas (1903–1936), Inés Acevedo Biester (1905–1995), Débora Arango (1907–2005), Josefina Albarracín (1910–1997), and Hena Rodríguez (1915–1997). Thanks to their groundwork, the generation of women artists that followed in the latter half of the century was able to establish itself as a cohesive force, laying the foundations for careers that transcended the boundaries of the national context.