The new iconoclasts

During the 1960s and early 1970s, a handful of young Colombian artists, including Feliza Bursztyn, Beatriz González, Bernardo Salcedo, Álvaro Barrios, and Antonio Caro, boldly transgressed artistic conventions to create art that critics labeled New Realism, Pop, Environments, and Conceptual Art. They achieved success with the crucial support of national and local art institutions. While critics and curators promoted this striking new work as international, it was firmly rooted in national artistic, social, and political reality. The New Iconoclasts: From Art of a New Reality to Conceptual Art in Colombia, 1961-1975 is a nuanced examination of this transgressive art with regard to its relationship with institutional goals and structures. Relying on extensive archival research and interviews with artists, author Gina McDaniel Tarver reveals at the root of contemporary Colombian art an ambivalent, often contradictory, and highly productive relationship between artists and institutions and between local and international aesthetics and social concerns.