Mitte, Berlin
Juan Pablo Echeverri
Works
Klemm's“Juan Pablo Echeverri’s work is deeply rooted in the visual culture of the second half of the 20th century. In a prescient manner, however, Echeverri raises questions that mark some of the most pressing anxieties of the present: What constitutes a being? How do we allow ourselves to be affected by others and by the images that surround us? How is an existence sustained through multiple, contradictory, and constantly shifting identities? His photographic and video series serve as visual evidence that the self is not an essence but an accumulation: a layering of cultural references, emotions, disguises, and masks that consumer society—a ceaseless flood of products largely inspired by Anglophone popular culture—has disseminated to even the most remote corners of the planet. Echeverri does not denounce this process from the outside. He inhabits it from within, with a lucidity that can only come from someone who has experienced it as both a contradiction and a resource simultaneously.” —María Wills Londoño Juan Pablo Echeverri’s (1978–2022) oeuvre consists of a progression of clearly demarcated cycles of images, with each cycle being both visually distinctive and endowed with a surprising formal stringency. Each series possesses a unique pictorial design and a rigorous, often surprising, formal logic. The constructedness of identity is the central theme of his many works. In the guise of a collector, Echeverri presented his audience with a multiplicity of personalities which, in their quantity and diversity, reveal both norm and deviation as social constructs.