BIOGRAPHY
Gisela Colón (b. 1966) is a Puerto Rican-American contemporary artist whose organic, totemic, light-activated sculptures and monumental environmental installations explore the subjectivities of human perception challenging viewers to experience transformation in real time and space. Colón’s polymathic practice has engaged the fields of Minimalism, Light and Space, Environmental and Land Art, through global projects in countries such as France, The Netherlands, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Cuba, activating three Unesco World Heritage sites.
Drawing from her formative years in Puerto Rico, Colón pioneered a language of “organic minimalism” employing as source material the energy of the earth, ancestral biological memories, and concepts of time, gravity, and universal forces of nature. Colón’s process of layering and stacking 21st century materials such as optical acrylics, carbon fiber, and strata of matter harvested from the geographical and liminal sites of her life, narrates her complex history as a diasporic Puerto Rican artist.
Colón’s Monoliths – tall, freestanding, totemic forms—in their evocations of earthly geologic formations, cosmological phenomena, and the aerodynamic geometries of the tools
of surveillance and war, represent a formal mediation of the disparate elements of her diasporic existence. The monolith form invokes bullets, projectiles, and missiles, consequently recalling the fraught history of militarized colonialism in the Caribbean generally, and the artist’s complicated personal experiences with gun violence more particularly.
Yet for Colón the monolith in its soaring verticality also echoes the arresting mountainous peaks of Puerto Rico’s El Yunque Rainforest and the Cordillera Central, an enduring source of materia prima for the artist. In her hands the violence of the projectile is subsumed into the primal, enigmatic form of the mountain in a decolonial act of transformative healing. Through the monolith, Colón transmutes forms of violence, displacement, and death into vessels of healing, light, and life, reconfiguring entangled histories into a universal language.
Colón’s work investigates and expands upon the history of color theory through the development of a method of producing a prismatic experience of color and light without the use of paint, realizing what she terms “structural color.” As vessels of structural color, Colón’s sculptures present a “fluid color spectrum,” a function of light refraction upon structural surfaces as manifested across the natural world. Colón’s use of asymmetrical, “humanized” geometrical forms, embody characteristics of organic life, changing and transforming their physical qualities depending on environmental factors and the position of the viewer, facilitating a unique perceptual experience of color as light in real time.
Since 2020, Colón’s practice has engaged the expanded fields of Environmental and Land Art, through global projects in countries such as France, The Netherlands, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Cuba. Colón’s work has activated three Unesco World Heritage sites, engaging with cultural, ethnographic, and anthropological conditions of the sites.
Notable Land Art 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), and 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).
Colón’s work was featured in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA’s) historic survey exhibition Light, Space, Surface: Art from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (2021-2022), and the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2022). In 2022, Colón presented a solo exhibition, The Feminist Divine, at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2022). In 2024, Colón presented Máteria Prima, a survey solo exhibition and Plasmático: El Cuarto Estado de Máteria, a large-scale environmental activation, at the Museu Nacional da República, in Brasília, Brazil (2024). Máteria Prima travelled to the Instituto Artium da Cultura, in Sâo 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.
Gisela Colón’s work resides in institutional collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; 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; Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; 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, California.