MARÍA BERRÍO

With its amalgam of painting and precise yet gestural collage, Berrío’s process echoes the structure of oral storytelling. Like folktales that are reshaped each time they are recounted, her compositions grow through accretion; each layer is another narrative element, achieved through the tearing and cutting of handmade paper into fragments. Often life-size in scale, Berrío’s subjects meet the viewer eye-to-eye, inviting entry into their luminous, densely textured and uniquely abstracted worlds.

Among the works on view in ‘Soliloquy of the Wounded Earth’ is a series of three full-length vertical portraits: Berrío’s reimagining of the myth of the three Moirai (the Greek Fates), a theme that has captivated artists for centuries. Here, she charges this classical narrative with cultural specificity by recasting the fabled arbiters of destiny as Colombian Cumbia dancers in vividly colored and decorated voluminous skirts. Each Fate swirls or unfurls an iridescent blue ribbon, symbolizing the delicate thread of life that they famously spin, measure and sever.

Berrío further expands upon the ancient tale across the exhibition. While developing this series of paintings, she conceived of a parallel world where humans have seized control of the Moirai’s threads, weaving the strands of their lives into banners and flags that they worship as gods. Their adherences lead to disagreements and rivalries which escalate into warfare—conflicts that leave a scorched landscape with the remnants of flags patchworked together to form bandages and shelters. This narrative is merely suggested by Berrío, leaving viewers to bring their own associations to the work.

In her titular composition, ‘Soliloquy of the Wounded Earth’ (2025), an elegant rider on a mystical horse traverses a backdrop of billboards, evoking a lone traveler in search of meaning amid the anxiety of information overload. In ‘The Ground of Being’ (2025), a stoic adolescent girl floats serenely among the streaming flags of a bustling procession. An aura of holiness emanates from her: her cerulean dress hints at the cherubic, her levitation at the celestial. Meanwhile, cavalrymen carrying diverse banners crowd the frame of ‘Edge of the Salted Plains’ (2025), suggesting a battle either imminent or just passed. In all these works, Berrío moves between the miraculous and the mundane, the fervor of belief and the chaos of conflict, placing the certainty of fate in tension with ambiguity, despair and hope––history paintings for a moment yet to pass.

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.