Alberto Baraya
Bogotá 1968.
Plastic artist, expeditionary, photographer and researcher. His work of the “herbarium of artificial plants” is a critical proposal of the scientific method as a unique category of knowledge. Alberto’s artistic practice is based on the model of naturalistic expeditions of the nineteenth century, in which he travels around different places around the world and, using various artistic techniques (collections, painting, photography, video, performance and installations) he manages to describe new geographies of our daily behavior. Since 1997, Alberto not just only collects different vegetable representations made by different artisans at semi-industrial workshops, but also, he himself produces his “botanical plates” with delicate compositions. In those plates, he arranges the small parts of the artificial botany collected, draws, photographs and juxtaposes them with pertinent documentation.
As an artist-traveler, his expeditions have disrupted the world of post-colonial physical and botanical anthropology, configuring the practice of “the Expedition” as an exercise in contemporary art.
In his most recent artistic proposal, Alberto works on a new conception of landscape representation and its contemporary transformations, recovering the exercise of nineteenth-century painting.
His latest works recreate environmental dystopia resulting from the zoological whims of modern man. In them, the landscape becomes the stage for contemporary fables of exotic animals.
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