Nostalgia - German Tellez Invitational

Opening Saturday September 26 12:00-16:00

“What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Colombian writer and Nobel Prize laureate

Swimming pools seen from above, vintage televisions, Pinocchio, urban ruins, bodies trying to find their place in a new life…

The world around us, and the things we surround ourselves with, can tell stories about who we have been, who we are, and where we belong. They can become markers of identity, connecting us to a particular time, place, or way of life. An old television can bring an entire era back to life. A place we once knew can suddenly have disappeared. The stories we are told, the films we watch, and the toys we play with shape our understanding of the world. And sometimes, a place we thought we knew can feel strange when fiction meets reality.

The world around us is constantly changing. The technology of today is obsolete tomorrow, and even the universe itself is expanding. These changes can create a longing for what is familiar. Nostalgia can emerge as an almost desperate attempt to hold on to the known rather than embrace the unfamiliar and unknown.

The exhibition is curated in collaboration with Colombian artist German Tellez, who has brought together five artists through his connections to the Colombian art scene. In their different ways, they draw on things, places, images, and experiences from everyday life. This is the first time Gallery Poulsen presents an exhibition bringing together artists with roots in Colombia. Together, the five artists offer a unique insight into different experiences and perspectives within the contemporary Colombian art scene.

German Tellez (1986, Bogotá, Colombia) works with alienation and the attempt to find one’s place in a world that is not always as one imagined it. His paintings are populated by hands and bodies reaching out, grasping, or trying to find their way. Drawing on his own experience as a migrant in the United States, Tellez explores the encounter between the culture one comes from and the new social codes and ideas one encounters elsewhere. His works revolve around the moment when the image we have of a place and a life collides with reality.

Gonzalo García Gaitán (1981, Bogotá, Colombia) explores how technology and media have shaped the way we see the world. In the series Panopticopías, vintage televisions become images of a time when the screen was a central gathering point in the home, bringing political, cultural, and personal images into everyday life. Although the old cathode-ray television has become obsolete, many of the images and ideas it helped shape continue to live on. García Gaitán works in watercolour, and the slow, handmade medium stands in contrast to the fast-moving images television once transmitted.

Esteban Ocampo (1987, Manizales, Colombia) takes everyday images and the memories attached to them as his starting point. Swimming pools, family, football, and summer holidays recur in his paintings, without belonging to a particular time or place. Seen from above, these familiar motifs become almost abstract. In Ocampo’s work, the everyday becomes an image of how personal memories merge with cultural images and ideas.

José Rosero (1988, Pasto, Colombia) works with abandoned and damaged places where traces of former life still seem to remain. In his surreal paintings, these places exist between past and present, between the familiar and the strange. Figures and objects emerge, opening up new ideas and meanings. The abandoned thus becomes not only an image of something that has disappeared, but also a place where something new can emerge.

Gabriel Angel (1992, Bogotá, Colombia) works with the images, myths, and stories that shape our shared understanding of the world. He brings together motifs from art history, popular culture, and childhood imagery across different times and places. In his paintings, icons and familiar myths become carriers of meaning, exploring how we are shaped from an early age by stories, rules, and ideas about who we are expected to be. In a similar way, he explores how ideas of desire and eroticism change in meaning when an ancient motif moves from mythology into contemporary visual culture.

Opening Reception, Saturday, 26 September, 12:00–16:00
Gallery Poulsen, Staldgade 32, Copenhagen
For more information: +45 33 33 93 96, [email protected]