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Maria Fernanda Cardoso
Maria Fernanda Cardoso (Bogotá, 1963) is a keen observer of detail, attentive to the geometric structures inherent in animal and plant morphology, drawing from them elements that are at once compositional and symbolic, since they reveal how life organizes and reproduces itself. She gathers and selects biological material — preserved animals and plants — to compose small cosmos and scenarios, as well as sculptural objects that arrest the gaze and invite analysis of memories and cultural manifestations tied to tradition and to critical phenomena of contemporary realities, bridging perspectives from art and science through the rigor of research.
She is a sculptor, visual artist, and PhD in Science and Philosophy, trained at the Universidad de los Andes and holding a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Installation from Yale University. That interdisciplinary crossing led her, in 2012, to complete a PhD at the University of Sydney, researching the aesthetics of reproductive morphology — work that gave rise to her project Museum of Copulatory Organs. Regarded as one of the most distinguished and internationally recognized contemporary Colombian artists, she has built a career spanning more than three decades that includes 46 solo exhibitions, participation in 146 group shows, and exhibitions in around 30 countries, at prestigious venues such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, MoMA and the New Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Sydney Opera House. She represented Colombia at the Havana Biennial in 1994 and the Venice Biennale in 2003. She has lived and worked in Sydney, Australia, since the late 1990s.
