Past
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Moonwatcher
Instituto de Visión, New York 8 May - 8 Jul 2025 Drawing from a legacy spanning over six decades, Moonwatcher invites viewers into a universe where the mythical and the human converge. The exhibition features The Invisible Flowers (1978-79), a series inspired by the artist's dialogues with Italo Calvino, where anatomical and botanical illustrations fuse into allegories of memory, desire, and time. Complementing these are the Fruits of Mourning, a body of work created during a profound period of personal loss following the death of the artist’s father. In these still lifes, dehydrated fruits and marble surfaces signify the alchemy of matter in flux. Through his iconic bronze sculptures and "imaginary manuscripts," Amaral continues his inquiry into the metaphysical, framing art as a portal to the transcendent mysteries of existence. Read more -
A Tree and its Shadow (Un árbol y su sombra)
Instituto de Visión 24 Oct 2024 - 24 Jan 2025 Utilizing the 'Tree of Life' from the Kabbalistic tradition as its curatorial narrative, the exhibition mapped Amaral’s trajectory from early subconscious explorations on paper to his iconic monumental bronze sculptures. Deeply informed by psychoanalytic thought and the avant-garde traditions of surrealism and automatic writing, Amaral's work invites viewers to engage with art as a metaphysical portal. The exhibition explored themes of opacity, ritual, and the "dark areas of the soul," presenting his sculptures not merely as objects, but as archetypal manifestations embedded within cultural memory. The "shadows" referenced in the title evoke the inseparable relationship between the artist’s physical presence and the visitors, archetypes, and ghosts that inhabit his creative sanctuary. Read more -
Jim Amaral: Etcéteras
Atrio Tower, Bogotá, Colombia 15 Dec 2022 - 24 Mar 2023 Structured across multiple venues and spatial conditions, Etcéteras resisted chronological rigidity in favor of conceptual fluidity. The exhibition traversed Amaral’s early surrealist-inflected works through to later meditative compositions and sculptural investigations.
Amaral’s practice emerges as inherently hybrid: a continuous negotiation between intimacy and monumentality, fragmentation and cohesion, sensuality and abstraction. His work destabilizes scale and logic, constructing dreamlike scenarios where objects, bodies, and symbols coexist in unresolved tension.
The exhibition foregrounded recurring motifs—erotic fragmentation, symbolic objects, funerary stillness, and metaphysical landscapes—revealing a sustained inquiry into identity, transgression, and existential solitude.
Installed across the 30th floor of Torre Atrio and the Bancolombia exhibition space in the same buikding, the project also incorporated the Mourning Fruit paintings, emphasizing Amaral’s reflection on time, decay, and the poetic residue of life.
Rather than a retrospective in the conventional sense, Etcéteras operated as an open-ended system—an archive of thought, matter, and transformation. Read more
