De la serie mujer montaña: los elementos

Since the beginning of her career, Luz Lizarazo (b. Bogotá, Colombia, 1966) has explored the poetic, political, and spiritual significance of the female form in drawings, watercolours, paintings, sculptures, embroidery and installations, working with materials including glass, ceramics, wood, bone, wool and human hair. In her 2026 series, Mujer Montaña (Mountain Woman), Lizarazo integrates the female body into the natural landscape, merging its contours with the outlines of mountains, volcanoes, rivers, and hills. The convergence is articulated in titles such as Woman Volcano, Woman Hill, Abyss Woman, and Woman Plateau. Across the series, the female form is displayed in positions that are analogous with natural forms, and elsewhere pregnant with the night sky or sun.

Los Elementos depicts a volcano next to an area of black, night sky. A river wraps around the volcano’s base, curves back on itself, and extends down into a small pocket of bright blue ocean. Seven figures are embedded within the image, occupying the geological spaces of water, cosmos, and earth which constitute it. Between figure and landscape, there are no clear outlines; instead the various coloured forms, deposited in ink, appear fluid and combined. The only real border is the thick black line tracing the edge of the page. The figures in Los Elementos come into being through Lizarazo’s depictions of earth, water, fire, air and aether. By rendering her figures indivisible from the elements she attaches them to, Lizarazo dissolves their boundaries and makes them continuous with nature. Her figures become one with the landscape, and its forces become one with them; there is no separation.

The Mujer Montaña series was inspired by Mountains (1940), a watercolour by Colombian artist Débora Arango’s (b. Medellín, 1907). Arango’s painting depicts a nude female figure lying outdoors on a white blanket against a mountain range of deep blues and greens. The composition is such that the contours of the woman, who lies in the foreground with raised knees, not only echo the landscape but become part of it, her bent leg another summit in a sequence of mountainous peaks.

Mountains was exhibited alongside works by Lizarazo in Birds and Mountains Inhabit Us at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM) in 2026. The show brought together works which “reflect on the body-territory as a permeable realm, a realm of transformations that questions the separateness of humanity from other forms of existence…” 1 Much of Lizarazo’s work can be seen from this vantage point, where the relation between the human body and the natural world is viewed as rich ground on which to explore broader political and spiritual themes.