Magola Moreno is a Colombian painter from Barranquilla. Before she turned to painting, she worked as a creative director at an advertising agency. She has written that at 40, aware that she had always been an obedient woman and had already lived half of her life, she found in painting an existential and practical path. She began painting “late,” in her words, just in time to never be considered a young artist.
Oil painting, which she approached “purely by instinct,” led her to her own voice; her subject, in her words, is “women and their possible representations.” She places her work outside the established tradition of portraiture and describes it as atmospheric and theatrical. Speaking to Cambio in 2025, she said her work goes “en contra de la historia, a contrapelo, como diría Walter Benjamin” (against history, against the grain, as Walter Benjamin would say), perhaps, she added, because her own life had been pushed to the margins by her personal and family history. In April 2023 La República reported that she painted in isolation outside Pueblo Bello, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a village surrounded by Arhuaco and Kogui settlements whose largely Indigenous population supplies the characters in her paintings.
Galería Elvira Moreno in Bogotá opened her first solo exhibition in April 2023. In April 2025 her series Contraimagen was on view at Casa Más in Bogotá during ARTBO. SGR Galería showed her work in Beyond What's Given, from August 27 to September 22, 2025, at Zona Maco in February 2026, and in ANTEROOM in Bogotá, from March 26 to May 9, 2026.
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