ART Bo 2026:
paula cabral muchacho & suwon lee
24 - 27 september
For this, our second year participating at Art Bo, Colombia’s biggest art fair, we have gathered the works by Venezuelan artists Suwon Lee and Paula Cabral Muchacho. Structured around the landscape as an expanded territory of identity, this proposal is a sensorial construct where memory, the body, and lived experience intersect through distinct formal approaches. Join us in this conversation between generations, where te artist present an activation of the landscape as a site of subjective projection and as a point of departure for reflecting on intimacy, affect, and politics.
In her Sacred Mountains series, Suwon Lee begins with landscape imagery that serves as an initial substrate onto which she develops a painterly intervention that challenges the boundaries between figuration and abstraction and between painting and photography. Working through layered surfaces, veils of paint, and gestural marks that conceal, reveal, and transform the original image, Lee creates an ambiguous relationship between what remains recognizable and what disappears. In this process, the landscape ceases to function as a fixed image and instead becomes an active field of inscription, where painting introduces a bodily dimension that reshapes perception. The depicted territory shifts into a space where identity is continuously constructed and negotiated, understood as a permeable extension between subject and environment. The notion of the "sacred" does not refer to spirituality in a literal sense, but rather to the possibility of activating the landscape as a site of symbolic and emotional condensation.
Paula Cabral Muchacho presents a series of paintings that, through a decidedly abstract approach, evoke landscapes that do not refer to any specific geography but rather to an internal experience of territory. Her works are built through brushstrokes, accumulations of material, and rhythmic variations that create vibrant surfaces, where the painterly gesture functions as the record of a lived moment. Rather than representing, her paintings suggest and whisper: they are spaces that emerge through the very act of painting, as though the landscape comes into being within the process itself. In this sense, every element, color, mark, and density, forms part of a visual language that articulates sensations of belonging, displacement, and memory.
Landscape thus emerges as an emotional and process-based construction, where identity is understood as something in constant transformation.
The dialogue between these two practices establishes a shared terrain in which landscape is no longer understood as a genre but as a conceptual framework. While Suwon Lee begins with an existing image that is traversed and rewritten through painting, Paula Cabral Muchacho allows the landscape to emerge directly from the materiality of gesture, without the need for any prior reference. In both cases, however, painting operates as a means of exploring the relationship between interiority and exteriority, body and territory, memory and image.
Both artists share a sensibility that finds in the landscape a way of approaching identity from an expanded perspective. Their works propose a shift from representation toward experience, from description toward affect, opening a space in which landscape is understood as a site where the personal is inscribed, while also serving as a field through which broader narratives of belonging and meaning-making are articulated.
The presentation at Artbo therefore proposes an intergenerational dialogue that brings together two distinct approaches to contemporary painting from Latin America. While Suwon Lee returns to the fair, further consolidating her ongoing investigation into the image and its transformation, Paula Cabral Muchacho makes her debut in this context, introducing a practice that positions the painterly gesture as the very site where landscape comes into being. Together, their work proposes a reading of territory not as a fixed place, but as an experience in constant flux, where identity and landscape continuously shape one another.
Suwon Lee // Pico Bolívar II, 2025 // Oil pigment stick and medium on pigmented inkjet print, mounted on forex // 100 x 70 cm
Detalle del estudio de Paula Cabral Muchacho
Suwon Lee // Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, 2025 // Oil pigment stick and medium on pigmented inkjet print mounted on forex // 40 × 30 cm.
Paula Cabral Muchacho // Barely there, 2025 // Mixed media on canvas // 60 x 50 cm
Suwon Lee // Canada (Diptych), 2025 // Oil pigment stick and medium on pigmented inkjet print mounted on Didond // 167 x 105 cm
Paula Cabral Muchacho // Fluyes con tus luces y sombras, 2025 // Acrylic on canvas // 130 x 90 cm
Suwon Lee // Mount Everest, 2025 // Oil pigment stick and medium on pigmented inkjet print mounted on foam board// 29,5 x 42 cm
AUTANA
For many Indigenous peoples of the Venezuelan Amazon, Autana is regarded as the Tree of Life a sacred axis connecting the earthly and celestial realms. In this work, the mountain transcends its geography to become an inner landscape. Born in Venezuela to Korean immigrant parents and later becoming part of the Venezuelan diaspora, Suwon Lee returns to Autana through memory, not to depict it as it is, but to reconstruct her relationship with the homeland it represents.
If, in Indigenous cosmology, Autana unites earth and sky, in Lee’s work it also bridges past and present, belonging and displacement, memory and imagination. Distance transforms landscape into symbol. Through subtle interventions with oil pigments and metallic surfaces, Autana is reimagined as a sacred space where memory, mourning, and belonging converge. The work forms part of a personal cosmology born of displacement, preserving through imagination what time, distance, and destruction threaten to erase. More than a representation of the landscape, Autana proposes an act of return, not to a physical place, but to a homeland that continues to exist in memory.
Autana, 2026 by Suwon Lee
Oil pigment stick and medium on pigmented inkjet print.
40 x 62 cm
Edición de 3 + 1 AP
La propuesta de Suwon Lee y Paula Cabral Muchacho para Artbo se articula en torno al paisaje como un territorio expandido de la identidad, entendido como una construcción sensible donde memoria, cuerpo y experiencia se entrelazan. A través de aproximaciones formales distintas, las artistas activan el paisaje como un espacio de proyección subjetiva y un punto de partida para pensar lo íntimo, lo afectivo y lo político.
En la serie Montañas sagradas, Suwon Lee se basa en imágenes de paisaje que funcionan como un sustrato inicial sobre el cual despliega una intervención pictórica, que tensiona los límites entre figuración y abstracción. La artista trabaja desde la superposición de capas, veladuras y gestos que cubren, revelan y transforman la imagen original, generando una relación ambigua entre lo que se reconoce y lo que se pierde. En este proceso, el paisaje deja de operar como una imagen fija para convertirse en un campo activo de inscripción, donde la pintura introduce una dimensión corporal que reconfigura la mirada. Así, el territorio representado se desplaza hacia un espacio donde la identidad se construye y se negocia, entendida como una extensión permeable entre sujeto y entorno. La noción de lo “sagrado” no remite aquí a una espiritualidad literal, sino a la posibilidad de activar el paisaje como un lugar de condensación simbólica y afectiva.
Por su parte, Paula Cabral Muchacho presenta una serie de pinturas que, desde una aproximación decididamente abstracta, evocan paisajes que no remiten a una geografía concreta, sino a una experiencia interna del territorio. Sus obras se construyen a partir de brochazos, acumulaciones de materia y variaciones rítmicas que configuran superficies vibrantes, donde el gesto pictórico funciona como registro de un momento vital. Más que representar, sus pinturas sugieren: son espacios que emergen desde la práctica misma, como si el paisaje se generara en el acto de pintar. En este sentido, cada elemento —color, trazo, densidad— forma parte de un lenguaje que articula sensaciones de pertenencia, desplazamiento y memoria.
El paisaje aparece entonces como una construcción emocional y procesual, donde la identidad se manifiesta como algo en constante transformación.
El diálogo entre ambas prácticas permite trazar un campo común en el que el paisaje deja de ser entendido como un género para convertirse en un dispositivo conceptual. Si en Suwon Lee el punto de partida es una imagen que se ve atravesada y reescrita por la pintura, en Paula Cabral Muchacho el paisaje emerge directamente desde la materialidad del gesto, sin necesidad de una referencia previa. Sin embargo, en ambos casos, la pintura opera como un medio para pensar la relación entre interioridad y exterioridad, entre cuerpo y territorio, entre memoria e imagen.
Ambas artistas, venezolanas y pertenecientes a generaciones distintas, comparten una sensibilidad que encuentra en el paisaje una forma de abordar la identidad desde una perspectiva expandida. Sus obras proponen un desplazamiento desde la representación hacia la experiencia, desde lo descriptivo hacia lo afectivo, abriendo un espacio donde el paisaje se entiende como un lugar de inscripción de lo personal, pero también como un campo donde se articulan narrativas más amplias sobre pertenencia y construcción de sentido.
La presentación en Artbo propone así un diálogo intergeneracional que pone en relación dos maneras de entender la pintura contemporánea desde América Latina. Mientras Suwon Lee regresa a la feria, consolidando una línea de investigación en torno a la imagen y su transformación, la participación de Paula Cabral Muchacho marca su primera presentación en este contexto, introduciendo una práctica que sitúa el gesto pictórico como un espacio de aparición del paisaje. En conjunto, la propuesta plantea una lectura del territorio no como un lugar fijo, sino como una experiencia en constante mutación, donde identidad y paisaje se configuran mutuamente.