Ana María Chamucero GBA

Born in Bogotá (1997) to a family from Pitalito, Ana María Chamucero’s practice is shaped by her constant movement between central and southern Colombia. Growing up between these two regions formed her attention to the improvised and inventive solutions in which objects are adapted, preserved, and reimagined across Colombian daily life. Likewise, her processes often draw from her training as a former classical ballet dancer.

Working across sculpture, drawing, and performance, she approaches household, found, and organic materials as partners in a shared choreography. Her current processes are guided by sets of cues such as “to sweep, to glide, to pivot, to isolate, to stretch, to repeat.” For her, these movements apply as much to dance as they do to the act of assemblage.

Chamucero’s process is grounded in rehearsal, discovering the gestures and possibilities the objects and materials she encounters can offer. In a shared dance or pas de deux in the studio, objects reveal how they can roll, tilt, rest, or pull away. These exchanges then develop into assemblages or arrangements capable of their own posture. The objects are no longer props: they become bodies, dancers in their own right.

Her work is also informed by the ways objects continually shift function in her home country’s daily practices: how they are redirected, extended, or combined through quick, intuitive gestures. Living there, she has often witnessed objects acquiring new purposes almost naturally: a tool meant for one task becoming useful for another, an everyday item taking on a role it was never intended for. These transformations carry a certain humour and an inventiveness that emerges from responding to immediate needs. Chamucero brings this sensibility into her studio practice, letting materials guide and reveal the movements, adjustments and solutions that emerge through their own behaviour. 

Chamucero holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art and a BA from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in Colombia and abroad. These include Artecámara 2021 (the emerging artists’ section of ARTBO, Bogotá’s International Art Fair); the virtual event Bienal Online: Mês da Videoarte 2021 as part of the Curitiba Biennial in Brazil; and the YICCA International Contest of Contemporary Art (Zagreb, Croatia, 2019), where she received first place. Most recently, she was nominated for the Premio Arte Joven 2024 (Young Art Prize Colombia), having also been shortlisted in 2020.