Juan Blanco (born 1988 in Bogotá/Colombia) studied Fine Arts at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá (B.A.) and at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel (M.A.). He has specialised in graphic art, painting and installation. In 2019 he received the DAAD Prize for his outstanding achievements and special commitment at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule and in 2022 the Berlin Senate Scholarship for Art Spaces. Juan Blanco has been a fellow at Künstlerhaus Lauenburg since May 2024. Since 2018, he has been working with the collective MCWW, which searches for new strategies for institutional critique.

In his work, Juan Blanco explores the issues of climate, human appropriation and the domestication of landscape. In addition to the classic woodcut, which he exhibits as a polyptych, he also uses hammocks as a medium, which can be viewed from below due to their height, so that a blurred map can be recognised.

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In the development and usage of his own pigments from collected plants such as brambles, nettles and buttercups on the banks of the Elbe and in Schleswig-Holstein, he translates elements of the landscape into a map, symbolising humanity’s mastery over territory.

These experiments result in a palette of blue, green, yellow, brown and grey, which provide the images in the ham-mocks an emotional and cosy space, that in turn invites to view the hammock as a place of peace and contemplation.

As a contrast, the wood-cuts, hung like a kind of collage, show the boundaries of a map that, between the continuity of the strokes and the end of the image, reveal the impossibility of representing a territory.