Colombian art

[5] The earliest examples of gold craftsmanship have been attributed to the Tumaco people of the Pacific coast and date to around 325 BCE.

[citation needed] The Museo del Oro in Bogotá displays the most important collection of pre-Columbian gold handicraft in the Americas.

Roughly between 200 BCE and 800 CE, the San Agustín culture, masters of stonecutting, entered its “classical period".

During the early period of the Colombian republic, the national artists were focused in the production of sculptural portraits of politicians and public figures, in a plain neoclassicist trend.

During the 20th century, the Colombian sculpture began to develop a bold and innovative work with the aim of reaching a better understanding of national sensitivity.

Colombian colonial art includes altar wood carving masterpieces and the statues for religious processions.

As throughout much of the history of art around the world, these usually anonymous artisans produced work that served the ideological needs of their patrons, in this case the Catholic Church.

Another Seville native, Baltasar de Figueroa El Viejo (1629–1667), settled in Bogotá in the early 17th century and set up an artist's workshop.

But it would be one of the Figueroa family's apprentices, Gregorio Vázquez de Arce y Ceballos, who would stand out among all painters of the colonial era.

His depictions of the Trinity as a single figure with four eyes and three faces, an innovation unique to Latin America, would be later condemned as heretical in part because they resembled Hindu deities.

From 1920 to 1940, Marco Tobón Mejía, José Horacio Betancur, Pedro Nel Gómez, Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo, Santiago Martinez Delgado and Alipio Jaramillo produced several mural paintings influenced by the Mexican muralists, with neoclassic features and influences of Art Nouveau.

During the 1940s, a rising international disinterest in the Colombian art caused the local artists to try new ways of expression such as Post-Impressionism and French scholar style.

Carlos Correa, with his paradigmatic “Naturaleza muerta en silencio” (silent dead nature), combines geometrical abstraction and cubism in a style still recurrent today in many artists.

Pedro Nel Gómez, in his “Autorretrato con sombrero” (1941) (self-portrait with hat) shows influences from Gauguin and Van Gogh.

As in many other parts of the world, future actors and actresses begin their performing experience in theater many of them with the goal of making it to television or film.