At first glance, Manuela Caicedo’s work seems to belong to the realm of quiet gestures, the kind that unfold through time, attention, and reflection. Beneath that subtlety lies a profound inquiry into the nature of perception itself: what it means to see, to imagine, and to coexist with what cannot be easily explained. Her work emerges from silence —from gestures so subtle they seem to vanish as they happen— inviting slowness, a way of attending to the world that transforms looking into an act of tenderness.
As she prepares to present a new body of work at the Collectors VIP Lounge at Art Basel Miami 2025, the Colombian-born, New York–based artist continues her sustained meditation on transformation, memory, and the elusive architecture of the invisible. Her participation in this year’s Lounge is presented as part of her Chubb Fellowship, awarded by the New York Academy of Art, a distinction that recognizes artistic voices whose work demonstrates exceptional conceptual depth and technical sensitivity.
Caicedo’s practice moves fluidly between drawing, painting, installation, and poetic language, and is defined by a continuous attempt to unearth the immaterial, those threads that connect gesture, material, and the imaginative act. “My work explores the relationship between observation and imagination as a response to the invented world,” she writes. “Through drawing, painting, and poetic language, I nurture imagination and intuition like an animal that lives within us all.” This creature, what she calls animal furioso, embodies the restless, untamed energy of creation, a presence that refuses containment and thrives in the act of becoming.
Educated in Industrial Design and Visual Arts at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and later earning her MFA from the New York Academy of Art, Caicedo’s trajectory reflects a dialogue between structure and surrender. Her works have been exhibited internationally in venues such as Sotheby’s, Belard Gallery, Espacio Odeon, Powerhouse, and The Green Family Art Foundation, as well as through residencies at The Met Copyist Program. Each context has expanded her sensitivity to the interplay between art’s material body and its metaphysical shadow.
The pieces she will present in Miami continue this line of inquiry. They evoke what could be described as an archaeology of perception, artifacts that register the moment where the tangible meets the imagined. Her compositions often reveal their own making, inviting the viewer to read process as content: graphite traces, marks of erasure, textures that oscillate between control and collapse. In this way, Caicedo’s work speaks less about representation than about the act of perceiving itself, reminding us that every image contains its reverse, every certainty its fragile twin.
Her reflections on “looking for the back of God,” a metaphor she frequently invokes, encapsulate this search for the unseen dimension of reality, the side of experience that escapes visibility yet shapes all that is visible. This idea aligns her, not in style but in spirit, with artists like Agnes Martin or Francis Alÿs, who approach form as a vehicle for contemplation rather than expression.
In Caicedo’s hands, material becomes an agent of revelation. Graphite, wood, and fabric are not merely mediums but thresholds, portals into the mutable relationship between mind and matter. Her art reclaims slowness as a radical act in an age of overexposure. It suggests that attention, when practiced deeply, can itself be a form of resistance.
Her return to Art Basel Miami, after a 2024 participation that established her as one of the fair’s most quietly compelling presences, marks not a repetition but an expansion. The Collectors VIP Lounge, often reserved for works of intimate scale and conceptual depth, offers the ideal setting for her understated yet potent visual language.
In a contemporary landscape often dominated by immediacy, Manuela Caicedo’s art insists on duration. It asks us to look not only at what is presented but at what flickers around it, the invisible hum that connects imagination to the world it seeks to reimagine. Through that attentiveness, she transforms stillness into a kind of motion, and perception itself into an act of faith.
