黑料不打烊

Andrea Echeverri at her solo show Ovarios Calvarios (2021): Photo courtesy of Claustro de San Agusti虂n

There are voices, singers, bands that resonate within our souls and stay with us through life: nights out with friends, blasting rock music through the car speakers while speeding down an empty road, hair tousled by the wind, a smile on your face… These are, surely, some of the memories that come to mind when Latin Americans think of the art of Andrea Echeverri, but there are many other faces of her creativity that may need some more digging into. Specifically, her almost baroque, and sometimes bizarre, ceramic sculptures.

(Bogotá, Colombia, 1965) is mostly known as the lead singer, composer and founder, along with Héctor Buitrago, of the Colombian alternative rock band “Aterciopelados”, originally founded in 1990 as “Delia y los Aminoácidos”. World-famous “Aterciopelados” is considered one of the most important references of alternative rock in Latin America and the whole Hispanic world, fusing pop and rock elements with Colombian folk tradition and psychedelic elements, addressing important political issues such as climate change, women’s rights, gender-based violence and social injustice. They have created for themselves a distinctive sound that is both pleasing to the public and seemingly sweet, but that accompanies deep, meaningful and well thought lyrics often making clear, direct political and ethical statements. Echeverri also plays and composes for her own solo project and has become over the years one of the most important and representative voices of Latin American contemporary music, a fact that is even more significant when we take into consideration the deeply rooted sexism and discrimination women face in the region.

But even though Echeverri leads her band and her own solo music projects, her academic formation lies elsewhere. Graduated from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá with a degree in Fine Arts, Echeverri later studied ceramics at the Plymouth College of Arts (1988), which is today the Arts University Plymouth in the United Kingdom.

As a ceramist Echeverri has participated in multiple important collective art shows in Colombia, Cuba and Mexico, such as: El barro tiene voz at the Museo Nacional de Colombia (2013), Retrospectiva at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Barranquilla (Barranquilla, Colombia, 2008), Bienal de arte del MAMBO (Bogotá, Colombia, 1995) and Bienal de Arte de La Habana (Cuba, 1994). In 2012 one of her ceramic pieces was shown at the Museo de Antioquia (Medellín, Colombia) to create a dialogue between contemporary ceramics and pre-Hispanic tradition.

Pieces of Andrea Echeverri: Photos ©

Her most recent solo show, , held at Galería Arte Salón Comunal, a famous independent gallery at Bogotá, Colombia, closed to the public on August 11, 2025. This show served as a perfect opportunity to dive into Echeverri’s ceramic works, her leitmotivs and their relation to her music and that of her band. Nicho Candela brought together works and series from different times of her production, which let us take a closer look at her obsessions and some of the themes that are recurrent in her music and her plastic creations: eroticism, freedom, feminine and Latin American power, motherhood and gender-based violence, to name a few. All of these themes appear in forms that could be related to the works of Surrealism or folk art: the improbable, surprising relations between different objects, the impudence with which the use of elements related to death and the female genitalia are used, forms that resemble tears or drops of breast milk depending on the composition, drops of blood and cutesy hearts made out of the same vibrant red, smiling stripped snakes that twist like springs, ready to jump, curved serpentine-like human figures with exaggerated facial features and vine-like arms…

More political was her solo show Ovarios Calvarios, held at the Museo Claustro de San Agustín in Bogotá, from November 26, 2021, to October 30, 2022, commissioned and sponsored by the Dirección de Patrimonio Cultural from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Andrea Echeverri at her solo show Ovarios Calvarios (2021): Photo courtesy of Claustro de San Agusti虂n

The show, curated by María Belén Sáez de Ibarra, was, according to ’ website, “A song of sisterhood for the victims of sexual assault in Colombia”, a country that, by August of 2024, had an approximate of 106.601 reported cases of gender-based violence, from which a 76% was directed against women. The cases of femicide in this Latin American country had an increase of 50% by the month of February of 2025 in comparison to the same month of 2024. This is the context in which Echeverri works creating music and ceramics to denounce the discrimination and violence that Colombian women face every day.

Ovarios Calvarios opened to the public on November 26, 2021, just one day after the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, promoted by the United Nations General Assembly to raise awareness of the challenges and dangers women face in every corner of the world: femicide, sexual assault, gender-based violence, sexual trafficking and forced disappearances, to name only a few.

Apart from the copious ceramic pieces the show includes an immersive art installation made by Echeverri and Aterciopelados, with the collaboration of the singers Vivir Quintana, Las Añez and La Muchacha, who lend their voices for the songs (“Ovaries”), (“Mourner”) and (“Don’t rape”) that were part of the final piece along with their respective videoclips, in which Echeverri’s plastic creations are part of the set, costumes and props.

The set of songs presented at the exhibition with this group of powerful female, Latin American voices are a manifesto against gender-based violence.

Echeverri fills the space with protest songs and ceramic pieces that hang from the walls: signs with written messages glazed in red that vary from metaphors of violence to affirmations and reproaches; female genitalia, bodies and faces made out of various pieces of ceramic. Echeverri molded and assembled the eight gigantic crying faces, with a mouth, a nose, two eyes and mobile-like structures that make the tears that fall from them, all while composing the songs that accompany the exhibit; this fact makes these faces a unifying piece that ties together the music and the ceramic.

Ovarios Calvarios (2021): Photo courtesy of Radionica

These faces, some of them surrounded by breasts made of brown clay from which drop-like pieces representing the white milk drip, are mourners that directly confront the spectator at the show, denouncing the fate of many Colombian women at the hands of criminals.

The assembled faces, the breasts, the vulvas that cover almost all the space of , all of them shed tears of different colors: blue, white, yellow and red. Body fluids mix together showing pain, sadness, but also relating to normal bodily functions, connecting the viewer with them as if saying: we are the same because we shed the same tears, blood and urine, because we were all raised with the same milk. In one of Echeverri’s hanging ceramic signs reads: “... nevermore trapped / instead free / strong and divergent / nevermore separated / better together and building / bridges” (“... nunca más atrapadas / más bien libres / fuertes divergentes / nunca más separadas / mejor juntas y construyendo / puentes”).

Tears and milk are mixed with blood drops that emerge from pieces molded as vulvas that encapsulate a mirror at their center; for Echeverri this is a statement: How can anyone rape, assault or hurt a part of the human body from which every one of us came from; it’s like attacking the first house, vessel and refuge all humans had as a whole: the place where life originally comes from shouldn’t be tarnished by despicable acts of violence and aggression. Apart from the mirror, they also have the names of various victims and survivors of sexual assault engraved in bright red, along with phrases like “We are all mothers, sisters, daughters, friends”.

Pieces by Andrea Echeverri at her solo show Ovarios Calvarios (2021)

This gesture takes the pieces and their significance to another level, they are not only a metaphor, a social comment hanging on the walls of a gallery, they are documents of heinous acts committed against Colombian women with names and faces, and histories… Sofía, Dayana, María, Jovita, Salome, Laura, Maritza, Camila, are not only names, nor statistics or mere numbers presented by the Ministry of Justice; they are real people, real victims and survivors. And as the spectator faces these pieces and reads their names, they are faced with their own reflection from inside the folds. They are just like you and me reading this.  

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