BIOGRAPHY
Gisela Colón (b. 1966) is a Puerto Rican-American artist whose works traverse land interventions, sculpture, painting, video, and photography. Her practice of organic minimalism addresses the entanglement of ecological phenomena, personal and ancestral memory, and the relationship between cultural anthropology and the natural world. Fusing ancient symbolism with futuristic aesthetics, Colón’s work embodies the metaphysical tension between permanence and ephemerality, the planetary and the cosmic, the grounded and the infinite.
She is best known for her abstract monoliths (2015-present)– tall, freestanding, totemic forms– created with materials ranging from 21st-century aerospace-engineered carbon fiber and optical acrylics to earthen and ancient minerals like onyx and alabaster. Her early material experiments began during her formative years in Puerto Rico, where she began sourcing organic material from the forest and objects from her quotidian surroundings such as bullet casings. Transmuting her personal memories of the tension between a rich and fertile landscape with the presence of violence on the island, her sculptures resemble archaeological structures–such as obelisks or Taíno ceremonial stones– rendered with the foreboding metallic smoothness of a projectile missile or aircraft fuselage emerging directly from the earth. Colón’s monoliths merge these dichotomous qualities, placing objects that envision ancestral memory in conversation with the complex present and imagined future, transcending time and place into something humanly universal.
Over the course of her career, Gisela Colón’s work has been framed within the legacies of Minimalism, Light & Space Art, and Land Art. Formally, Colón’s practice evolved from her earlier investigations in painting (beginning in the 1970s with her childhood landscape experiments in Puerto Rico, to her earthen paintings of the 1990s-2010s) and continues to mine the history of color theory through the invention of a method of producing a prismatic experience of color without the use of paint, realizing what she refers to as “structural color.” In 2012, Colón expanded the dimensions of her practice into sculpture, developing her Pods body of work (2012-present), cell-like vessels with humanized geometrical forms that embody characteristics of organic life. Observing nature-driven structural color behavior, her sculptures change and transform their physical qualities depending on environmental factors and the position of the viewer, facilitating a perceptual experience of color as refracted light. Colón’s oeuvre is rooted in dynamics found in physics and deep space, representing her profound connection to earth and cosmos, the generative landscapes of Puerto Rico and Western America, and the transformative power of the natural world.
Colón’s polymathic practice has engaged global projects in countries such as France, The Netherlands, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Cuba, and Turkey, activating three UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Notable monumental land installations and public exhibitions include: The Future is Now for the Land Art Biennial, Desert X AlUla (Saudi Arabia, 2020); Forever is Now (Egypt, 2021) presenting a site-specific monument at the Pyramids of Giza, a UNESCO landmark dating back 4,500 years; Godheads - Idols in Times of Crisis in the Oude Warande Forest (Netherlands 2022); One Thousand Galaxies of Light (Starfield), an immersive light installation at the Wadi Hanifa River, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (November 2022); If The Walls Could Talk / Reclaimed Stones: Foundations of Civilization, Past, Present, Future at the UNESCO World Heritage Site, The Citadel of Salah al-Din, Cairo, Egypt (October 2023); and Máteria Prima, a survey solo exhibition and large-scale environmental activation Plasmático: El Cuarto Estado de Máteria at the Museu Nacional da República, in Brasília, Brazil (2024), which traveled to the Instituto Artium da Cultura, São Paulo, Brazil (2024).
Most recently, Colón participated in the XV Havana Biennial, Horizontes Compartidos, at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Cuba (2024) in a thematic exhibition devoted to women artists of the Caribbean titled La Tradición se rompe pero cuesta curated by Jorge Fernández Torres, museum director and José Manuel Noceda, original founder of the Centro Wilfredo Lam and the Bienal de la Habana.
Forthcoming solo institutional exhibitions include: Radiant Earth at the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut (2026), and Materia Prima Patria at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2026).
Gisela Colón’s work resides in institutional collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; El Museo Del Barrio, New York, NY; Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena, San Juan, Puerto Rico; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Mint Museum, North Carolina; and the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA, amongst others.
Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, the artist lives and works in Los Angeles and the California desert.