The artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition celebrates more than fifty years of artistic practice and coincides with the publication of Azout’s recently released monographic book, which surveys five uninterrupted decades of her work.
The exhibition presents a selection of unseen works, including stainless steel sculptures, photographic installations printed on aluminum and intervened with gold paint, and a video installation on view in the gallery’s Project Room.
Lydia Azout: Reflections…now
The ocean is a calling force—an elemental voice that reminds Azout she is inseparable from nature. Throughout her practice, her intention has remained constant: to search for goodness and to affirm that darkness never fully eclipses light. Metal and iron—materials she considers noble and transformative—became central to her work, allowing her to construct fragile equilibria held together by a single point, a revelation that reshaped her sculptural language.
A defining moment occurred during a devastating hurricane experienced on a Caribbean island. What followed was fear, rupture, and an overwhelming awareness of human fragility in the face of nature’s power. In the storm’s aftermath, Azout encountered a transformed seascape—violent, deafening, and raw.
Through these works, Azout communicates vulnerability and scale, urging reflection amid global turbulence. She believes art must challenge, suggest rather than declare, and preserve mystery. Within opposing forces—chaos and calm, darkness and light—she insists on one certainty: after the tempest, a golden light emerges. And it is winning.
Lydia Azout is a central figure in Colombian and Latin American modernism. Over more than five decades, her sculptural practice has forged a singular language at the intersection of geometry, nature, and spirituality. Since the 1970s, her work has moved fluidly between intimate scales and monumental installations, consistently balancing formal rigor with contemplation.
Deeply informed by early encounters with pre-Hispanic cultures and sacred landscapes in Colombia, Azout’s work draws from ancestral cosmologies and archaeological sites, where space, ritual, and symbolism are inseparable from the natural environment.
These influences crystallized in seminal projects such as Fuerzas Agustinianas (Augustinian Forces), presented in multiple iterations, including at the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO) in 1986. This body of work established a neo-totemic approach that continues to shape her artistic methodology.
Azout’s sustained engagement with sacred geometry—through elemental forms such as the circle, triangle, square, and pentagon—has become a defining axis of her sculptural language. Working primarily with iron, she transforms industrial material into a vehicle for metaphysical inquiry, imbuing geometric structures with organic vitality and spiritual resonance. Her practice departs from the austerity of late modernist abstraction, humanizing monumentality and inviting contemplative engagement.
The works presented in this exhibition reflect Azout’s ongoing exploration of mutability and transformation. Incorporating air, space, and material processes, her sculptures are conceived not as fixed objects but as elements within an organic cycle.
Reflections…now reaffirms Lydia Azout’s enduring relevance and her vital contribution to contemporary sculptural discourse, where geometry, ecology, and spirituality converge.
Excerpt from the essay by Eugenio Viola, PhD, Artistic Former Director of the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO), written for the recently published monographic book on Lydia Azout.
Dot Fiftyone is a Miami based gallery with a focus on contemporary Latin American art. Founded in 2003 by Alfredo Guzman and Isaac Perelman, the gallery is dedicated to exhibiting emerging and established artists whose works encourage dynamic ideas and discourses. Workshops, lectures, events, as well as philanthropy are also part of the gallery program.
Mr. Perelman, former President of the Miami Art Dealers Association (MADA), and Mr. Guzman, former chairman on the Board of the Wynwood Arts District Association (WADA), have reinforced their involvement in the development of the arts in the city.
Dot Fiftyone enjoys a strong collector base in Miami, New York, Houston, Los Angeles, and Latin America.
