Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978-2022) is a renowned contemporary artist from Bogotá, Colombia whose prolific body of work can be read as a continual self-portrait in many parts. Translating to Lost Identity, the exhibition’s title is lifted from a handwritten note taped to the wall in Echeverri’s studio. The phrase resonates on a number of levels. Before his passing, much of Echeverri’s thinking was around challenging the flattened, essentialist reading of identity at play in today’s art world. In his characteristically playful, hyper-contemporary manner, Echeverri resisted the generalized insistence upon the performance of a “real” Latin American identity.

During his teens, Echeverri began experimenting with his appearance and, in turn, its documentation. The impulse would later crystallize in his seminal miss fotojapón series (1998-2022), a daily project of recording his likeness in a photo booth, resulting in a collection of over 8000 self-portraits. This ritual exercise ran parallel to more than 30 series of photographic series and video works that disclose Echeverri’s infatuation with the performativity of identity and fantasies of the self made possible in our photographic world. Echeverri describes these projects as “a series of beings that have been brought to life as a consequence of an exposure to icons, music, fashion, advertising, TV, films, and all the things we encounter on a daily basis.” The exhibition includes two panels of over 400 images each from miss fotojapón, each uniquely combined from the larger series, presented for the first time in New York.

To learn more, visit James Fuentes Gallery’s website.