Ana Mercedes Hoyos was a Colombian artist known for her contributions to modern art in her country. Over her 50-year career, she received numerous national and international awards, totaling over 17. Starting with Pop Art, she later delved into abstract, cubism, and realism, exploring light, color, sensuality, and the Colombian landscape.
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She also reinterpreted master painters and delved into Colombian multiculturalism. Her later works focused on the Afro-Colombian and mestizo heritage within the country.
Her artwork is held in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Fuji Art Museum in Tokyo, the Ibercaja Collection in Zaragoza, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, and Juan Antonio Roda. She donated her archival materials on San Basilio de Palenque to the United Nations University in Tokyo and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
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Ana Mercedes Hoyos Early life
Ana Mercedes Hoyos Mejía was born on September 29, 1942, in Bogotá, Colombia to Ester Mejía Gutiérrez and Manuel José Hoyos Toro. Her father, an architectural engineer, fostered Hoyos’ interest in art history from a young age.
She attended Colegio Marymount in Bogotá, where she received private painting lessons from Luciano Jaramillo, while completing her primary and secondary education. Alongside her formal schooling, Hoyos traveled to Europe, Mexico, and the United States to explore art in different cultures.
Ana Mercedes Hoyos Career
Hoyos continued her education in visual arts at the University of the Andes under the tutelage of Jaramillo, Juan Antonio Roda, Marta Traba, and Armando Villegas, although she did not complete her studies. In 1967, she married architect Jacques Mosseri Hané and the couple traveled to New York City to explore exhibits of Pop Art before returning to Bogotá, where their daughter Ana was born in 1969.
Hoyos started her artistic journey as a teacher at the University of the Andes in 1961, while also exhibiting her work from 1966 onwards. Her art initially reflected the Pop Art style and later moved to minimalist and abstract works, resulting in her Ventanas series that won her the Caracas Prize in 1971. In the mid-1970s, her Atmósferas series broke free from the window frame and focused on exploring light through color layers. The success of this series led to international recognition, including a Paris Biennale and a Latin American artists’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro.
Hoyos then explored floral and fruit works, removing spatial references to focus solely on the flower or fruit head. Her still lifes series, featuring fruits typical of Cartagena, used oblong forms that balanced shapes of plantain with watermelon. Between 1984 and 1987, she paid homage to master painters by reworking their paintings to insert her own view of the magical or mythical and ethnic experience into the European tradition.
Through her still lifes, Hoyos became interested in her Afro-Colombian heritage, researching the history of slavery and freedom and documenting San Basilio de Palenque’s history. This led to her most famous works that portrayed the Afro-Colombian community using exaggerated light and details infused with tropical images and colors to depict the Caribbean coastal populations and vegetation.
Hoyos received several invitations to participate in cultural exchange programs, conferences, and exhibitions throughout her career, including an invitation from President Bill Clinton to participate in a conference on “Culture and Diplomacy” held at the White House in 2000. In 2005, a retrospective of her works from a 36-year period, including Ventanas, Atmósferas, still lifes, tributes, and Colombian negritude, toured throughout Mexico and Colombia. Her contemporary style reflected both art movements of her era and her pictorial commentary on Colombian culture and history.
Ana Mercedes Hoyos Death and legacy
Following a brief hospitalization, Hoyos passed away on September 5th, 2014 in Bogotá. Throughout her lifetime, she received more than 17 national and international awards in recognition of her remarkable contributions to the arts.
Her works can be found in the permanent collections of esteemed institutions such as 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 of Roslyn Harbor in New York, as well as the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art and numerous other museums across Latin America.
To commemorate her life and achievements, on December 17th, 2022, the Google Doodle was dedicated to Hoyos.
