ARTBO
BOGOTA 2026
BOOTH D3 | ÁGORA BOGOTÁ
MOISÉS BARRIOS
For ARTBO 2026, Galería Extra presents a project by Moisés Barrios bringing together five bodies of work from across his practice: Paradisíaca, Arcadia, Banana Republic, Paisajes Recientes, and Bananópolis. Through these works, Moisés examines the relationship between territory and historical memory, with particular attention to the political, economic, social, and cultural impact of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and the Caribbean.
Spanning more than three decades of Barrios’s practice, the selection traces the persistence of a central inquiry into how images shape our understanding of territory and how, beneath the paradisiacal image of the tropical landscape, histories of exploitation, desire, violence, and transformation continue to unfold.
Moisés Barrios, Guatemala
In the Paradisíaca series, bananas appear alongside tropical flowers, sunsets, and volcanoes in landscapes that evoke both exuberance and loss. The images engage with the advertising postcards produced by banana companies, which helped establish an idealized vision of the tropics as a fertile, exotic territory available for consumption. Through this tension between landscape and its representation, Barrios constructs a paradise shaped by histories of exploitation and by the traces they have left on the land.
This universe extends into Arcadia, a series begun in the 1990s in which the banana operates as a metaphor for decay. By placing this motif in dialogue with images and icons from the history of Western art, Barrios subverts the idea of the tropics as a lost paradise, proposing instead a territory marked by pollution, violence, and unequal power relations. Paradise thus emerges as a historical construction whose promise of abundance also contains the conditions of its own ruin.
In Banana Republic, Barrios deepens his investigation into the legacy of the banana companies in Central America. His paintings cover objects and images from everyday life, as well as references to the market, advertising, and the art world itself, with banana skins. This deliberately ironic gesture turns the expression “banana republic” into a lens through which to examine the material and symbolic structures that persist beyond the era of the great fruit companies.
Moisés Barrios, From the Series: Bananópolis, 2014
Moisés Barrios, From the Series Paradisíaca, 2025
Paisajes Recientes continue this investigation. Created between 2023 and 2026, these pieces return to the coastline and tropical territory as sites for observing natural and political phenomena. Here, landscape becomes a repository of memory: a place where the region’s abundance, hardships, and historical transformations are inscribed.
The project also includes Bananópolis, an investigation that began in 1997 with Barrios’s study of the United Fruit Company and the cultural representations associated with the so-called Banana Republic. In these works, Barrios intervenes in art magazines, partially covering their images with a banana-skin texture. This gesture of concealment and revelation draws connections between Central American territory and the globalized world of consumption, between the experience of the citizen and that of the consumer, and between the history of the banana companies and contemporary structures of the market and visual culture.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
