The Quiet Revolution of Landscape Painting in Colombia
Ana Mosseri Hoyos is a painter, educator, and until recently, the gallerist behind SN Macarena in Bogotá, Colombia. Long engaged with academic circles, Mosseri has cultivated a tight-knit community of artists devoted to figurative and landscape painting—genres often overshadowed in Colombia’s contemporary art market, which tends to privilege the conceptual, the political, and the abstract.
Tarde de perros en el campo II (variación #3), 2022, oil on canvas
At the core of Mosseri’s artistic practice is a meticulous study of light, color, and atmosphere. Her landscapes and figurative works unfold through a process that marries classical technique with contemporary tools: she begins with digital sketches to test color relationships and compositional balance, allowing her to iterate with precision before transferring the final version to canvas. Only when she’s resolved these digital drafts—often through multiple printed iterations—does she commit to oil paint.
This hybrid methodology reflects the essence of her broader work: a fusion of tradition and experimentation, past and present.
Tarde de perros en el campo I, II, y III(variación #4), Exhibition view of Disco de Newton in La Casita, Bogotá
Mosseri recently announced her departure from her role as director of SN Macarena, passing the gallery on to her daughter, Ana Fernández, who represents the third generation of women in the family to shape Colombia’s cultural landscape. It’s a poignant transition, marking both continuity and renewal within a family whose legacy is deeply entwined with modern Colombian art.
Born into a lineage of artists and art dealers, Ana Mosseri was raised in her mother Ana Mercedes Hoyos’ studio—a space filled with painters, thinkers, and rigorous technical training. Hoyos, a pivotal figure in Colombian modernism, instilled in her daughter a devotion to craft and formal experimentation. When Mosseri assumed leadership of her mother’s gallery—then called MaCa—she transformed it into a space for intergenerational dialogue and painterly exploration, curating a roster of more than twenty Colombian and international artists, including Catalina Ortiz and Eloísa Castro.
“People want to live with images that bring them joy... there’s something deeply emotional about having a landscape on your wall”
The artist in her studio
This belief underpins much of her work. From her early career, Mosseri has turned her attention to the intimate and the everyday: portraits of her daughter as a child, quiet interiors, familiar trees. A formative period spent in New York introduced her to the cyclical rhythms of seasonal change—a revelation for someone raised in Bogotá’s relatively constant climate. The result was a suite of fourteen oil paintings capturing the same tree in Central Park, transformed across the seasons. Through these works, Mosseri treats nature not as background, but as subject and feeling—deeply observed, quietly radical.
Her 2024 solo exhibition Prenné, held at the Centro Colombo Americano in Bucaramanga, offered a retrospective glimpse into her refined process: photographs, digital sketches, and finished canvases side by side. The show emphasized her commitment to method and memory, revealing how each composition is distilled from careful observation, emotional resonance, and a painter’s obsession with color and light.
Exhibition photo of ‘Prenne’, atCentro Colombo Americano
Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia, August 2024
At a time when beauty and tradition can be seen as subversive in the art world, Mosseri and her community are quietly reasserting their place in the canon. Through her paintings—and through the community she has nurtured—Mosseri affirms the enduring relevance of the landscape, not only as genre, but as emotional register, cultural marker, and site of renewal.
Campo de margaritas en Central Park, 2023, digital print
Academic realism has long occupied a marginal position in Colombia’s contemporary art scene, often dismissed in favor of conceptual, political, or socially engaged practices that have dominated the country’s post-conflict discourse. Institutions and markets alike have tended to favor abstraction, installation, and experimental media, leaving little institutional support for traditions rooted in classical technique or representational fidelity. In this climate, Mosseri’s commitment to academic rigor—her focus on drawing, composition, and the atmospheric possibilities of oil painting—emerges as a quiet form of resistance. Rather than retreating into nostalgia, she reclaims landscape and figuration as fertile ground for formal innovation and emotional depth.
Exhibition view of ‘Campo de margaritas en Central Park’ in NH Galería, Cartagena, Colombia, October 2023
