MARÍA BERRÍO

Life

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, María Berrío studied in New York, receiving a BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2004 and an MFA from the School of Visual Art in 2007. Primarily trained in charcoal drawing and painting at school, she later began incorporating Japanese paper into her collages, after discovering the material during her MFA.

María Berrío Artworks

María Berrío frequently draws from South American literature and folklore in her work, as well as her childhood memories of Colombia and contemporary political and social realities.

Women: an empowered femininity

Women are the main protagonists of Berrío’s collages. Whether by themselves or in groups, they often stare back at the viewer with piercing eyes. The artist has described her female figures as hybrid figures that express ’an empowered femininity’ of both power and vulnerability in women.

In Aluna (2017), a group of women are waist-deep in water; one bends over what appears to be the body of a tiger, while two others hold a stream of water in their hands. This collage is inspired by a tradition of the Kogi people from Colombia, who raise their mamas or chosen priests in a cave for the first nine years of their lives so that they may experience aluna—‘the mind of nature’, as the artist explained in her interview with The Georgia Review in 2019—in its fullest.

Migration and Border Control

Mass migration, displacement, and government measures at various borders have been a recurring theme in Berrío’s collages. In Wildflowers (2017), women and children surround a seemingly stranded railway carriage in a field of flowers. The artist has explained that the title references the resilience of flowers as an allegory to the immigration crisis, while the painting evokes the formation of a community. Oda a la Esperanza (Ode to Hope) (2019), in which eight girls each cage a bird in their hand, was inspired by the separation of families at the U.S. border.

Children and their experiences are the focus of ‘The Children’s Crusade’, a series of large paintings in which Berrío draws from the contemporary migration across the Mediterranean and the US border with the Children’s Crusade of 1212, a popular religious movement that saw thousands of children and young people embark on a journey to Jerusalem.

María Berrío Exhibitions

María Berrío has held solo exhibitions at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The artist’s first survey exhibition, María Berrío: Esperando mientras la noche florece (Waiting for the Night to Bloom), was presented at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 2021.

Berrío’s work has been shown in group exhibitions at Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; The Drawing Center in collaboration with Pace Gallery, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C..

Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2024