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Angie Rangel Memory · Migration · Emerging Technologies

Artist Statement

Angie Rangel is a Colombian visual artist whose work begins with memory. Inspired by the women in her family, the dresses they made, her childhood diaries, and the Colombian Caribbean, she creates paintings that feel like rooms filled with memories. Some are real, others imagined, but each one tells a story. Dresses, rivers, plants, and hybrid creatures become symbols of identity, transformation, and the traces people carry throughout life.

While painting remains at the center of her practice, living and working between Colombia and Silicon Valley has expanded her artistic research. Surrounded by one of the world’s leading centers for technological innovation, she began exploring how artificial intelligence, animation, immersive environments, and digital culture are changing the way we remember, create, and experience the world. Rather than replacing traditional painting, these new media allow her to extend it. Her work brings together craftsmanship and emerging technologies, reflecting on the meeting point between cultural traditions that risk being forgotten and the new forms of memory being shaped in the digital age.

Now on View

Nuevos Horizontes, Angie Rangel, 2026 — Oil on canvas, 20 × 20 cm. Exhibited at The MEAM Hall, MEAM Barcelona

"The MEAM Hall: 8th edition" is open now in Barcelona. The MEAM (Museu Europeu d'Art Modern) presents it as its small-format collective exhibition — "the largest showcase of contemporary figurative art in small format." Organized by the Fundació de les Arts i els Artistes, this edition brings together 161 selected artists in 20 × 20 cm format, exhibited in the museum's main hall. Rangel participates with "Nuevos Horizontes" (oil on canvas, 20 × 20 cm).

· MEAM, Barcelona — July 10 to November 1, 2026 (opening and certificate ceremony: July 10).
· La Zona Gallery, Madrid — November 12 to 29, 2026.

Ver la exposición en el MEAM →
Current Series

TAXONOMY
OF MEMORY

2025

Watercolor works exploring memory, repetition, femininity, and affective archives.

Taxonomy of Memory: Near Abstraction — Watercolor on cotton paper, 2025 Discover the Series →

UNCOOL ARTIST
RESIDENCY

Brooklyn Navy Yard, New York, 2025

My residency at Uncool Artist, based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was transformative on both a personal and artistic level. During this period, I became deeply aware of new ethical frameworks in contemporary art production, and more importantly, of how my work is understood within a global context.

During the final quarter of the fall–winter season, I developed a series of watercolors based on the textiles used in my childhood dresses from the late 20th century. These works function as a subtle, almost forensic reading of those garments: their materials, their use, and their journey.

This body of work combines symbols with strong traditional significance with individual human gestures. During the open studios at Uncool Gallery and the final presentation, the drawings activated a process of reconstructing past narratives.

"Her paintings act like an archive of personal experiences, memories, and desires. Rangel blends elements of folklore, art history, and family narrative to construct compositions rich with her own lore, welcoming viewers into the period rooms of her mind which encourage us all to reflect on our own constellations of personal inspirations."

— Julian J. Howard, Curator

Selected Works

View Complete Collection
The Wait — Mixed media on canvas
The Wait Mixed media, 100 × 100 cm
White Dress with Botanical Patterns — Oil on canvas
White Dress with Botanical Patterns Oil on canvas, 150 × 150 cm

Encounters (Encuentros)

There is a Greek myth that places the origin of painting in the hands of a woman. In Pliny the Elder's Natural History, there is an account about the origin of painting in which a maiden named Kora traces the outline of her lover's shadow before he leaves for war. Whether the myth is true or only legend, what is undeniable is that painting has always been a worker of memory, helping preserve what we consider of great value. Vincent wanted to preserve his boots, Séraphine Louis wanted to preserve her flowers, and Modigliani his beloved women.

Angie Rangel, who begins her path in art through painting, integrates it into her daily life, studies it, and approaches its enigmas in order to crystallize, through it, the moments that have marked her process as an artist and as a woman who has traveled through different places, among them her city of origin, Barranquilla. Thus, in her proposal we see a mixture of dreams and realities that highlight the architectures and ornaments of her former homes, evoking life alongside her grandmother, her childhood, the warm climate, and that Macondo-like atmosphere that merges with a new way of life through art, where unsettling pieces appear that evoke Jeff Koons or Botero, hinting at her arrival in the city of Medellín. It is precisely this that conjures the encounters that run through her life and her work, and that, like a "diary," she records in words on the back of her paintings, so that each experience remains contained in both text and image, fulfilling the full sense of evocation.

There is also, in her work, a special fondness for paintings of women. Another latent encounter with her femininity, with her ideals and with other women, where she explores with them her delight in clothing, attire, and the fusion between painting and fashion, reminding us of the exuberant stage costumes portrayed by painters of past centuries, dressing them in garments full of flowers, textures, ruffles, and, once again, memories. These encounters are the meaning of this exhibition, and they are the becoming of her life as an artist and as a woman in a city that inspires movement, femininity, and art.

— Úrsula Ochoa, Master in Aesthetics, Art curator and critic
Angie Rangel

ANGIE RANGEL

Angie Rangel (b. 1994, Barranquilla, Colombia) is a Colombian visual artist whose work explores memory through painting and contemporary media. Drawing from family history, childhood diaries, and the Colombian Caribbean, she creates paintings she describes as “rooms of memory,” where dresses, rivers, plants, and hybrid creatures become symbols of identity, transformation, and personal history.

She received her BFA in Fine Arts from Universidad del Atlántico and has expanded her practice internationally through exhibitions, artist residencies, and research. In 2025, she was selected for the Uncool Artist Residency in New York, where she continued her studies at the Art Students League of New York and participated in the League’s Student Salon. Her work has been exhibited in Colombia, Spain, and the United States, including at the Museu Europeu d’Art Modern (MEAM) in Barcelona. She has also presented participatory projects with the support of the Consulate General of Colombia in San Francisco, and her work is available through Artsy.

Rangel currently develops her artistic research between Colombia and California. While painting remains the foundation of her practice, her experience within the technological environment of Silicon Valley has expanded her research into animation, artificial intelligence, immersive media, and digital environments. Rather than replacing traditional painting, these media allow her to investigate how cultural memory can be preserved and reimagined in an increasingly digital world. Her practice bridges the cultural traditions of the Colombian Caribbean with the visual languages of ultra-contemporary culture, exploring the relationship between craftsmanship, technology, and the future of image-making.

MONUMENTAL
SCULPTURE

Conceptual prototype for a monumental sculpture: a crocodile with monarch butterfly wings. A study in magical realism, cultural memory, and the intersection of Caribbean mythology with contemporary sculptural practice.

3D render of crocodile with butterfly wings sculpture

Exhibitions

081 Gallery
2025 El Retiro, Antioquia

081 Gallery

Encuentros
2024 Medellín, Colombia

Encuentros

Bolero de Ravel
2023 Barranquilla, Colombia

Bolero de Ravel

Esencia Caribe
2018 Museo del Atlántico

Esencia Caribe

News

Angie Rangel with Sonia Marina Pereira Portilla, Consul General of Colombia in San Francisco, at the 2026 Colombian Independence celebration A visitor participates in Angie Rangel's Leave a Memory art activation at the Colombian Independence celebration
San Francisco · July 26, 2026

Art, memory, and migration at Colombia's Independence celebration

Angie Rangel presented Leave a Memory during Colombia's Independence celebration in San Francisco, with the participation of Sonia Marina Pereira Portilla, Consul General of Colombia. Through the artwork and a public invitation to leave a personal memory, Rangel brought her research on memory and migration into a collective setting—strengthening the institutional visibility and community impact of her practice.

Angie Rangel with Consul General Sonia Marina Pereira Portilla; community participation in Leave a Memory.

Angie Rangel at Murano glassmaking workshop

Angie Rangel during a glassmaking workshop at Mazzega Murano Glass Factory, Murano Island, Venice. February 2026.

The MEAM Hall opening night — gallery wall with 20 × 20 cm works at MEAM, Barcelona, including Nuevos Horizontes by Angie Rangel

Barcelona, July 10, 2026 — Opening night of "The MEAM Hall: 8th edition" at the Museu Europeu d'Art Modern. 161 works in 20 × 20 cm format fill the museum's main hall; Rangel's "Nuevos Horizontes" is among the selected pieces. On view through November 1, then at La Zona Gallery, Madrid.

Photography: Natalia Correa, director of DATARTE — The MEAM Hall opening night

Encuentro DATARTE

Encuentro DATARTE at Sala de Arte Bancolombia, Bogotá, Colombia. January 2026.

Ultra-Contemporary

DIGITAL
EXPLORATIONS

Ultra-Contemporary

AI-generated video works exploring the migration of pictorial language into digital realms — where painting and generative processes converge.

The Immersive Room

The Immersive Room is born in the California Bay Area — the place where the technology that redefines how the world sees is invented. Here, where the algorithms are written, Rangel proposes stepping inside the painting: a dark gallery of ten-meter walls where her oils — surreal interiors, botanical dresses, gold against ultramarine blue — are projected floor to ceiling and flow like a slow river, dissolving into one another without cuts. Monarch-winged caimans lift off the canvas and the room travels into open space: ringed planets, a golden city on the Moon. No screen, no frame: the visitor stands inside the work. That is ultra-contemporary — the painter's hand and generative processes in a single experience you inhabit, not observe.