Gisela Colón
Canadian, 1967 (active USA)

Skewed Square (Phosphorus), 2022
blow-molded acrylic
54 × 42 × 12 in.

SBMA, Gift of Eugene Fu
2023.15



Gisela Colón, photograph at SCAD Museum, Savannah, Georgia, 2022.

“All of my recent pieces are a continuum of my practice of organic minimalism but extrapolated and extended into the natural world.” - Gisela Colón



Gisela Colón, Sueño del Yunque, 2005, oil on wood, 40 x 72 x 2 in. This dream of light fragmented through the leaves of the Yunque rain forest in Puerto Rico moves toward the glittering light she later achieved with optical materials.

COMMENTS

Gisela Colón’s monoliths and small glowing pods capture our gaze, their colors produced by light, not paint. She says the bullets and mountains of her monoliths come from within her, reflecting her “vevencias,” the internalized experience of the universe and her early life.

Born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1966, the family moved in 1967 to Puerto Rico, where her father, a chemist, monitored air quality for the government. The scientific curiosity which nurtured her discovery of unique artistic materials was inherent in her family—her grandfather, a cartographer, and both grandmothers were scientists, a pharmacist and medical researcher. Her mother, an artist, began Gisela’s painting lessons with oil impasto on board when she was 4, often working with her, imparting the magic realism inherent in Latin American art, enhanced by her Puerto Rican grandmother who practiced “santeria” and was clairvoyant.

When she was twelve she lost her mother and the following year Hurricane David hit the island, not only causing wide destruction but ending her father’s job and leaving the family destitute. The ensuing years of hunger, poverty, and violence became the internal bullets which grew into the glowing monoliths of her mature work. The capacity to transform, to reimagine, through invented materials and her identification with the universe, supported by a Truman Congressional grant in 1986, continued to generate her art and the development of her style, organic minimalism. The next year she received a “magna cum laude” B.A. from the Univ. of Puerto Rico, followed in 1990 by a J.D. from Southwestern Univ. School of Law in Los Angeles. Clearly, Gisela’s desire to make a difference in the world extends beyond art into society.

In 2012, having moved to Los Angeles, she made friends with several light and space artists of the 1960s. Increasingly drawn to sculpture yet unable to find a new material, she employed a process of laminating and layering 21st century optical materials and achieved a “fluid color spectrum,” as Donald Judd called it. Gisela wrote, “I wanted the colors to fuse with the light and form multiple hues that were . . . constantly in flux.”

As her sculptural vision expanded, the need for stronger, more structural materials grew along with her commitment to working with light. In 2016 she discovered the use of aerospace carbon fiber and ultraviolet green urethanes to create large forms echoing ancient monoliths, Stonehenge, ceremonial offering altars—projecting a universal coming together of elements, light, color, power, resilience. The bullets and mountains she internalized as a child are now transformed into single, soaring, pulsating entities projecting universality and eternity. Her monoliths and pods have risen from Los Angeles to London, Saudi Arabia to Egypt, and most recently in a forest in the Netherlands.

Ricki Morse, La Muse, June, 2024