At OFFSCREEN, a selection of Ever Astudillo’s large pencil drawings are presented in dialogue with the artist’s 1970 photographs from the streets of Cali, Astudillo’s hometown. There is an essential dialogue between the two mediums throughout Astudillo’s practice, and the presentation of the drawings and the photographs in tandem allow for a deeper engagement with the artist’s expansive image-based practice. Astudillo was a member of the influential “Cali group”, a pioneering community of artists, filmmakers and writers active in the Colombian city, that focused on social realities, cinema and popular genres from the 1970s to today. By means of rigorous framing, Astudillo exalts the beauty of the streets of Cali, replete with electrical wires, movie posters, art deco buildings, and pedestrians at loose ends. His work focused on the poetry of urban neighborhoods, set off by the light and shadow of the landscape and by street signs.

Astudillo was featured in the group show Vampires Fear No Looking Glass, the curatorial research grant winner at the Rencontres des Arles, 2024. Astudillo studied at the Escuela Departamental de Artes Plásticas in Cali and then at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He was professor of Drawing and Painting at the Universidad del Cauca from 1973. In 1984 he received Honorable Mention at the first Bienal de Arte de América in Havana and first place at the Salón Nacional de Artistas de Colombia. An individual exhibition of his work, entitled Ever Astudillo: Crimen Perfecto, was organized at the Museo La Tertulia in Cali, Colombia in 2016.

Toluca Fine Art mainly champions artists from Latin America, many of whom have been the subject in recent years of exhibitions curated by Alexis Fabry: Graciela Iturbide, Heliotropo 37 (Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2022), Miguel Rio Branco, Photographies 1968-1992 (Le Bal, Paris, 2020), Urban Impulses (The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 2019), Indicios de la vida urbana. Facundo de Zuviría (CCK, Buenos Aires, 2019), Noches Fieras (Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico, 2018), Géometries Sud (Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2018), Pulsions Urbaines (Rencontres d’Arles 2017), Fernell Franco. Cali Clair-Obscur (Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2016), Urbes Mutantes (International Center of Photography, New York, 2014).