In 1962, with the awarding of Alejandro Obregón's iconic painting, La Violencia, at the National Salon of Artists and the publication of the book La violencia en Colombia: Estudio de un caso social, a turbulent period of social denunciation began in the work of Colombian artists. Obregón's La violencia boldly and expressively fused the representation of the Colombian landscape and death in the lying, inert, and tortured body of a pregnant woman. The book La violencia en Colombia, in addition to its authors' analyses, statistics, and scientific data, gathered the testimonies of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators of the armed conflict that took place in Colombia between 1946 and 1958 between supporters of the two hegemonic political parties—the Liberal and Conservative parties—and also compiled photographs of the abuses inflicted on the population: beheadings, gruesome slashings of bodies, massacres, and executions. The publication became a controversial and uncomfortable book that exposed the morbid human behavior of political fanaticism in rural Colombia, and also pointed out the responsibility of liberal and conservative political supporters, military personnel, and priests in the midst of the conflict.

Under the influence of Obregón and the controversial book, young artists such as Carlos Granada (Honda, 1933 – Bogotá, 2015), Pedro Alcántara (Cali, 1942), Norman Mejía (Cartagena, 1938 – 2012) and Augusto Rendón (Medellín, 1933 – Villa de Leyva, 2020) enhanced the expressionism of their lines and brushstrokes to propose an aggressive and stark presentation of the abject and torn body, and thus, a new violent figuration emerged as an expression of an artistic manifestation of social denunciation. Inspired by the stories published in the book La violencia en Colombia (Violence in Colombia), these artists teamed up in 1965 to create Testimonios (Testimony), an exhibition originally presented in Cali, then at the Casa de las Américas in Havana in 1966, and at the Galería Universitaria de Arte in Caracas in 1967. In 1974, Granada, in association with Umberto Giangrandi (Pontedera, Italy, 1943) and Fabio Rodríguez Amaya (Bogotá, 1950) in the collective Taller Cuatro Rojo, published a portfolio of prints again under the name Testimonios (Testimony), which updated the theme, no longer alluding to the bipartisan conflict, but now to official violence and dissent with the National Front. These works coincide and temporally dialogue with the works presented in Granada '74–'78: reflections of an official violence.

While on the one hand, group work and reproduction techniques such as photoengraving and silkscreen printing promoted and made it possible to bring images charged with political denunciation to a wider audience, individual work and the emergence of new names such as Alfonso Quijano, Leonel Góngora, Umberto Giangrandi, and Ángel Loochkartt completed and consolidated the generation of the new expressionist figuration, and continued the dissemination of other testimonies of the human drama in Colombia throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

The political alignment, the activism of some of the artists of this generation, and their sympathies with the Cuban Revolution led them to forge closer ties with the Casa de las Américas in Havana, a cultural institution that brought together artists from across the continent to consolidate a political and anti-imperialist Latin American artistic project. Granada participated in the Latin American Plastic Arts Meetings in Havana in 1972 and 1973 alongside Taller Cuatro Rojo, and Pedro Alcántara presented several initiatives there, including the Graficario de la lucha popular en Colombia (Graphic of Popular Struggle in Colombia) (1978), a project produced by his new graphic arts association named Taller Corporación Prográfica. El Graficario brought together prints by 32 artists - Alejandro Obregón, Alipio Jaramillo, Pedro Nel Gómez, Luis Ángel Rengifo, Lucy Tejada, Augusto Rendón, Carlos Correa, Alfonso Quijano, Luis Alberto Acuña, Jorge Elías Triana, and Alcántara himself, among others -, a presentation by historian Álvaro Medina, and an introductory text by Gabriel García Márquez celebrating the importance of the artists' works as devices for disseminating state violence in Colombia: “In them, the most infamous repressions, the unpunished massacres, the merciless misery of a country whose greatest sign has been social injustice can be seen.”

As a context and extension of the exhibition Granada '74-'78: reflections of official violence, this show complements the historical review of the components of the new expressionist figuration and some of the milestones of its production that remained as evidence and Other Testimonies of the critical events that called the generation to an art of denunciation.

(Curated by Christian Padilla and written by Christian Padilla)