In Bogotá, the mountains are never out of sight. They rise abruptly along the city’s eastern edge, forming a green wall that shapes the capital’s light, weather and sense of place. For Colombian artist Marina Sánchez, the ridges that surround the Colombian capital’s cardinal points are also more intimate: a constant presence, a point of orientation and, increasingly, a subject of quiet urgency.

Her latest exhibition, Panorámicas de la Sabana, runs from 5 to 29 March inside the colonial  Museo del Chicó, where 26 acrylic-on-canvas works reinterpret the high-altitude plateau of the Sabana through a distinctly chromatic lens. Installed in the museum’s Salón Colonial, the show brings together landscape, memory and abstraction in a series that feels both personal and outward-looking.

Sánchez has long been recognized for her expressive use of colour but this body of work marks a measured shift. While her earlier practice leaned towards abstraction, here the forms are more legible—ridgelines, shifting skies, traces of vegetation – yet never fixed. Instead, they dissolve through layered pigments and gestural brushwork that privilege sensation over strict representation.

What distinguishes Sánchez’s approach becomes clear in the work itself. The Cerros are not rendered as stable topography but as shifting, atmospheric forms. Bands of diffusec green rise and fold into one another, interrupted by flashes of cobalt, ochre and lilac, while a dense, unsettled sky presses down with quiet intensity. The composition resists stillness. It moves – closer to inclement weather than landscape.

Rather than mapping terrain, Sánchez constructs it through colour. The mountains appear to breathe, their contours dissolving at the edges as if seen through mist or memory. There is no single vantage point; the eye travels across the canvas, tracing lines that feel at once familiar and unstable.

“I want to show the relevance of these giants that often go unnoticed,” Sánchez says. For Bogotá’s residents, the hills are omnipresent yet rarely examined beyond their silhouette. In her telling, they become active participants in the city’s identity – “guardians” that accompany an urban landscape marked by rapid, and at times impersonal, expansion.

The project began during the pandemic, when isolation altered both her routine and perspective. Working from home, Sánchez found herself drawn to the view outside her window: the slow fade of light across the mountains, the subtle shifts in colour at dusk.

“Being away from people – family, friends – I was left with the sky and the light of sunsets,” she says. “I wanted to replicate something I hadn’t fully appreciated and, in doing so, feel part of nature.”

Her visual language, however, is not shaped by Bogotá alone. Sánchez has exhibited in New York City and Milan – cities where she has also lived, and whose pace and structure have informed her approach to rhythm and composition. If Bogotá provides the grounding geography, New York and Milan introduce a contrasting sensibility: verticality, movement and a heightened awareness of structure.

These contrasting narratives – from urban to rural, isolation and engagement, are visible throughout Panorámicas de la Sabana. Linear gestures – suggestive of passing headlights or urban flow – cut across certain canvases, briefly suspending the stillness of the mountains. It is a restrained intervention but an effective one, hinting at the tension between expansion and preservation.

Colour, in Sánchez’s palette, is not decorative but foundational. Greens shift from luminous to dense; blues dissolve into shadow; entire forms recede into haze. The landscape is reassembled through pigment, hovering between recognition and abstraction.

She describes her work as “chromatic poetry”, a phrase that aligns with her broader intention: to create space for reflection. “I want to offer a moment of calm beyond the difficulties that surround us,” she says, “despite the inevitable conflicts, wars and inequalities.”

In Bogotá, that impulse carries particular weight. The Eastern Hills and peaks to the West are not only a visual constant but a fragile ecological system—central to water sources and biodiversity, yet increasingly under pressure from urban growth. Sánchez’s paintings do not argue this point directly; instead, they suggest it, allowing atmosphere and colour to carry meaning.

For the artist, colour remains essential. “It would be difficult for me to imagine the world in black and white,” she says. “Colour is vitality. It gives strength and solidity. It is pure magic.”

That conviction runs through the exhibition. The hills emerge not as backdrop but as presence—shifting, watchful and quietly insistent. In Sánchez’s hands, they ask to be seen again, and more carefully this time.

Panorámicas de la Sabana runs from 5 to 29 March at the Museo del Chicó (Carrera 9 No. 93-38, Bogotá). Admission is free.

Singapore has never been shy about scale. But this season, the city’s appetite for monumentality takes on a distinctly Latin American accent. For the first time, the work of Colombian master Fernando Botero makes his Singapore debut with the largest exhibition of his work ever showcased in Asia.

Spanning galleries, inter-active theatres and extensive public gardens, the landmark show presents more than 130 works, positioning the city-state as a hub for global Botero immersion. As the largest presentation of the Medellín-born artist (1932-2023), and timed to coincide with Singapore Art Week, Botero in Singapore unfolds across gallery walls, immersive media spaces and public gardens.

“My father loved Singapore,” remarked the artist’s son Fernando Botero Zea to The Strait Times, highligting that with this retrospective, the country now “has the highest concentration of Botero per capita”.

At the heart of the programme is Heart of Volume, a major gallery exhibition at IMBA Theatre, presenting more than 100 works drawn directly from the Botero family collection. Spanning seven decades, the exhibition traces the evolution of what the artist famously described not as exaggeration, but as “volume”: a formal strategy that lends weight, humour and authority to everyday scenes, portraits, still lifes and reimagined art-historical references.

Seen up close, the discipline behind Botero’s apparent abundance becomes clear. Small watercolours and intimate studies reveal a careful calibration of colour and balance, while larger canvases demonstrate his lifelong dialogue with European painting traditions—from Renaissance composition to modernist distortion—filtered through a distinctly Colombian sensibility. The effect is quietly didactic without ever feeling academic, a curatorial tone well suited to Singapore’s measured cultural landscape.

If Heart of Volume offers intimacy, Garden Grandeur delivers spectacle. Extending across the Silver Garden at Gardens by the Bay, ten monumental bronze sculptures bring Botero’s work into the rhythm of daily life. A towering Horse—more than three meters tall and weighing three tonnes – anchors the display, joined by familiar figures such as Adam and Eve, The Dancers and Woman on Horse. Installed against a backdrop of tropical greenery and glass conservatories, the sculptures feel less like foreign imports and more like temporary citizens of the city.

This democratic impulse was central to Botero’s thinking. As his son, Fernando Botero Zea, noted at the opening, the artist believed that public art should be touched, photographed and shared—an ethos that fits neatly with Singapore’s highly social public spaces. Here, Botero’s bronzes become meeting points and landmarks, their generous forms softening the city’s precision with a dose of playfulness.

The exhibition also introduces Life in Fullness, the world’s first immersive Botero experience: a 45-minute audiovisual journey narrated by his son, combining archival footage, animation and storytelling. It is a humanizing counterpoint to the grand scale elsewhere, framing Botero as father, provocateur and craftsman—an artist whose work often invites smiles, but is underpinned by a serious engagement with power, politics and art history.

Beyond the artworks themselves, Botero in Singapore signals a broader shift. Latin American artists have long been underrepresented in Southeast Asia’s major exhibition circuits, despite Singapore’s ambition to position itself as a global cultural hub. This collaboration—between IMBA, the Fernando Botero Foundation, and Colombia’s diplomatic mission—suggests a growing appetite for narratives that extend beyond the usual Euro-American axis.

There is also a certain symmetry at play. Botero’s art, with its emphasis on presence rather than speed, arrives in a city known for efficiency and control. His figures occupy space unapologetically; they slow the viewer down. In Singapore’s gardens and galleries, that insistence on taking up room feels less like excess and more like quiet persuasion.

As Singapore Art Week draws international collectors, curators and critics to one of the most affluent cities in Asia, Botero’s debut is both timely and long-overdue. It is not a retrospective weighed down by reverence, but a confident, outward-looking presentation that invites the public in – free of charge in the Gardens, and without intimidation indoors.

Botero’s Singapore moment is less about spectacle than about accessibility. His volumes, for all their heft, carry a lightness of spirit, and a persuasive contribution that art should always coexist alongside everyday life.