Often described as a subtle artist, overlooked by the critics of his time, nowadays Adolfo Bernal has reemerged as one of the figures most representative of conceptual art in Colombia. From the 1970s, his artistic production was built around language, both its limits and power as a force for creating meanings. Amateur poet, inspired by the city as a space of writing, Bernal dedicated his output to overcoming the spatial boundaries of art, either by pasting numerous posters on city walls juxtaposing seemingly random words, or by the introduction of reflective zinc panels producing light signals upon contact with the sun. The scope of his oeuvre expresses the artist’s constant concern to reveal the complexity of linguistic signs as cultural emanations, while playing with the possibility of making images appear by their very absence.
Adolfo Bernal
