Beings of plaster and skin.

• Author: Weiskopf, Jimmy
• Position: The work of sculptress Beatriz Echeverri

Something of the dynamism which enabled her forebears to transform the rugged Andean landscape of her native Colombia into one of the world's richest coffee zones shows in the work of the sculptress Beatriz Echeverri - only now she grapples with a different natural element, leather. This material, which we usually think of as being soft and pliable, becomes, in her hands, as monumental, voluminous and burnished as bronze, without losing its innate sensuality. Her sculptures in the form of bloated, twisted and almost monstruous torsoes, dismembered and, at times, enchained, not only reveal an artistic mastery that results from a quarter-century-long study of anatomy, but also betray a characteristically contemporary obsession with the anguish of the human condition and the deformation of twentieth century values.

Echeverri's patient delineation of fleshy contours is as old as Rubens and Rembrandt and has been revived in our day by many artists, among them the Colombian painter Fernando Botero. But whereas the figures of Botero are static and ironical, those of Echeverri writhe in a fearful confusion. It is almost as though the aesthetic of Giacometti had been turned inside out, so that the paradigm of tortured disgrace becomes fatness rather than a cadaver-like thinness. According to critic Ramiro De La Espriella, "the monstruousness doesn't consist in deformation but in rhythm and equilibrium, in that balance which is seen in the material concreteness of her figures.

The artist's originality overflows into her daily life as well. Echeverri's studio, for example, is a lovingly restored late-nineteenth century wooden railway carriage that sits majestically on the lawn of her country retreat in the Alpine-like surroundings of Bogota. When the truck transporting it had trouble with the narrow, unpaved lane leading up to her house, she summarily ordered trees, fenceposts and electricity poles to be knocked down. "The neighbors were furious," she explains. "But I paid for the damage and the scandal eventually died down. The main thing was that we got it here." A similar determination enabled her to overcome the crisis caused by the break-up of her marriage, which left her virtually penniless and responsible for three young children. Temporarily abandoning her art, she turned to landscaping gardens, including the one in Colombia's presidential palace, and selling insurance. Her successful business career, complemented by a score of exhibitions in...