A new exhibition at the Wolfgang Tillmans-founded Between Bridges commemorates the life and work of Bogotá-born artist Juan Pablo Echeverri whose prolific oeuvre can be read as an exercise of continual re-invention by means of the self-portrait. Translating to "Lost Identity," the exhibition’s title Identidad Perdida is lifted from a handwritten note taped to the wall in Echeverri’s studio and resonates to his practice of defying a flattened, static, and essentialist reading of identity in order to joyfully celebrate a simultaneity of embodiments.
During his teenage years Echeverri began experimenting with a seemingly infinite multiplicity of identity and gender expressions and, in turn, its documentation. The impulse would soon crystallize as a grand ritual for which he’d take every day portrait in a photo booth collecting the resulting passport-style portraits over the course of 22 years, each time performing neutrality or even a fearlessness in facing his own image. This series, titled miss fotojapón (1998–2022) – a wordplay on the homophone miss / mis (Spanish for my) and the Colombian photo store Foto Japón – comprises a pool of more than 8.000 portraits which Echeverri has exhibited in manifold variations, dimensions, and site-specific installations, shuffling images of himself across time, representing coded expressions through fashion and various formations of cultural appreciations amplifying the transformative potential of the self. For Between Bridges, three panels have been produced in the dimensions of 1 square meter – one size the artist in recent years was favorably disposed towards the series’ presentation – showing more than 400 self-portraits each.
This ritual exercise ran parallel to more than 30 series of photographic and video works that disclose Echeverri’s infatuation with the performativity of identity. In this way he is inscribed into lineages of artists who explore the medium of the serial self-portrait to inhabit a site for disidentification, as well as those who are embedded in an aesthetics and politics of visual and linguistic hybridity in order to negotiate majority culture from a position of being neither part nor not-part of it. Echeverri created fantastical personas and employed strategies of exaggeration while exhausting what might be considered good taste. Meticulously mimicking stereotypes of the every day with a sense of both affectionate and parodic representation, he simultaneously appropriated the repertoire of the norm and the non-norm to sabotage normativity.
The artist’s series were formally articulated with a sense of space and place as Echeverri thoroughly shaped the design and construction of his frames. Working for over 15 years with a local framer in Bogotá, Echeverri often took specific inspiration from his field investigations, and in his practice turned the photographic series into unique objects and sculptures.
Identidad Perdida at Between Bridges is a two-part exhibition organized in collaboration with James Fuentes, New York.
