Abel Rodríguez, a Nonuya artist who translated his information of crops within the Amazon into drawings that have been proven broadly at worldwide biennials, making him one of the well-known artists in Colombia, has died in Bogotá. His gallery, Instituto de Visión, introduced his passing on Thursday, however didn’t specify an age or a explanation for loss of life.
The gallery stated that Rodríguez, who was typically referred to as Don Abel, “handed away peacefully, surrounded by his devoted household and holding the hand of Doña Elisa, his soulmate and the love of his life.” His household contains his son Wilson Rodríguez, an artist who works underneath the identify Aycoobo.
Abel Rodríguez has up to now decade turn into a star of the worldwide biennial circuit, with appearances in current editions of Documenta, the Gwangju Biennale, the Biennale of Sydney, the Bienal de São Paulo, the Toronto Biennial of Artwork, and the Carnegie Worldwide. Final 12 months, he appeared within the Venice Biennale alongside Aycoobo.
At these biennials, Rodríguez confirmed his ink drawings of bushes and different crops within the Amazonian rainforest. Spare in type and wealthy with resonance, these drawings characterize leaves by little flicks of inexperienced ink and trunks by skinny watercolor washes. An array of birds can typically be seen amid the greenery.
In different drawings and work, Rodríguez depicted crops seen in isolation from their ecosystem, writing out details about every fern represented. Whereas these works could appear like the taxonomic imagery related to Western botany, Rodríguez meant his artwork as a way of recording Indigenous information.
“Remaking crops in my drawings jogs my memory of the passing of generations, of getting a baby,” he stated in a 2024 interview for the Museum of Modern Art. “We name our ideas youngsters—non secular youngsters who’re at all times with us. You attempt to seize that determine or harvest the identical because it was earlier than, however it is going to by no means be the identical.”
Despite the fact that Rodríguez has been readily embraced by the artwork world, he didn’t essentially think about himself a recent artist as outlined by the West. “We don’t actually have that idea, however the closest one I can consider is iimitya, which in Muinane means ‘phrase of energy’—all paths result in the identical information, which is the start of all paths,” he told curator José Roca when he was included in Documenta 14 in 2017.
Rodríguez was born Mogaje Guihu alongside the Cahuinarí River in La Chorrera, Colombia. (His start 12 months has tended to fluctuate broadly, along with his CV itemizing 1941 although Instituto de Visión stated right this moment that he was born in 1934.) He was raised by the Muinane folks, and he realized about crops from his uncle, a sabredor who amassed an enormous information of wildlife.
Rodríguez would later direct his uncle’s information towards serving to his folks facilitate the chagra, or a two-year farming system throughout which crops have been extracted after which raised anew, in an try restore the forest after having utilized its materials for one’s functions.
In 1959, when the inhabitants of Guihu’s village have been formally registered, he needed to tackle a Spanish identify. “They gave me the identify Rodríguez after a boss my father had, however I do not know what it means,” he stated within the MoMA interview. Mogaje Guihu meant “shining sparrow-hawk feathers.”
In the course of the Nineteen Eighties, Rodríguez met Carlos Rodríguez, a biologist with the Fundación Tropenbos Colombia, a Dutch NGO that aspires to help biodiversity in Colombia. According to NPR, Abel helped Fundación Tropenbos Colombia representatives establish native crops and decide which of them had medical functions.
Then, in the course of the ’90s, amid a interval of armed battle, Rodríguez was compelled to go away the rainforest. He resettled in what José Roca described as considered one of Bogota’s “poverty-ridden peripheral neighborhoods.” There, he reconnected with Carlos Rodríguez, who supplied Abel with the instruments to start making artwork. “I had by no means drawn earlier than, I barely knew the right way to write, however I had an entire world in my thoughts asking me to image the crops,” he as soon as instructed a Fundación Tropenbos interviewer.
Initially, Rodríguez stated, his artwork “seemed ugly,” as he recalled within the MoMA interview. “However what mattered was going to the forest in my ideas and thoughts, and talking and naming from there. As soon as I’m there, I write down the colours and smells, the place they’re, what animals eat them and once they rot. The interpretation will not be simple—there are a whole lot of names I do know in my language that I’m not certain the right way to flip into Spanish. The work assist me translate with out phrases, to speak what’s in my thoughts, and to point out it in a approach folks perceive.”
He would go on to create works that inform the tales of the forest—its creation and its crops, and methods to proceed nourishing it.
Rodríguez was not broadly identified to the artwork world till 2008, the 12 months he appeared in a gaggle present at Bogotá’s Museo Botero. 5 years later, he appeared in “Sakahàn: Worldwide Indigenous Artwork,” an acclaimed and influential present held at Canada’s Nationwide Gallery of Artwork.
But regardless of his many appearances in vital exhibits and massive biennials, he regularly reaffirmed that his drawings and work have been extra than simply artwork objects. “In my language, we converse of data, work, intelligence, and craft—that’s what is behind photos,” he instructed his MoMA interviewer. “Artwork? I don’t assume so.”
