Oscar Muñoz

Born Popayán, Colombia, 1951.  Lives Cali, Colombia

Cortinas de baño (Shower Curtains), 1994
Acrylic on plastic, five curtains
74 x 27 ½ inches each
Collection Miami Art Museum, gift of George M. Safirstein M.D. and Pola Reydburd

Credit line: Reproduced with the permission of the artist
Photo credit: Peter Harholdt

Cortinas de baño (Shower Curtains) is part of a series of works in which the artist uses water and paint on common shower curtains to create ghostly figures that hover on the border between presence and absence.

The disintegrating images of figures attending their bath are a poetic and desolate metaphor for the deterioration and violence of contemporary life in the artist's native Colombia. A puddle of reddish-brown pigment at the feet of one of the figures presents an ambiguous image that can be read either as a bath towel or a pool of blood, making palpable both the ordinariness of the figures' actions and the transitory and vulnerable condition of life in a culture overwhelmed by death.