Sonia Gutiérrez (born 1947 in Cúcuta, Colombia) is an artist specializing in drawings, oil paintings, and print making.
Following this, she continued her studies at Atelier 17 in Paris, a school founded by Stanley William Hayter, an English artist.
From approximately 1948 to 1958, extreme violence and atrocities began taking place, a period named “La Violencia.” It was essentially an intense political feud between Liberals and Conservatives, causing more than 200,000 people to lose their lives.
In the following years, she had solo exhibitions in multiple locations including Bogotá, Cucuta, Medellin, and Bucaramanga, where she displayed several works, such as, Los que son (1968).
Gutiérrez's work was influenced by Pop Art and focuses on the political struggles of Colombia, as seen in her 1972 painting Seguiremos diciendo patria, which portrays a man and a woman being hung upside down by their ankles, with their backs turned to the viewer.
In 1977, she created the painting Y con unos lazos me izaron (And They Lifted Me Up With Rope), which she based on the case of Dr. Olga López who, along with her five-year-old daughter, was arrested unjustly and tortured by Colombian police officers for two years.
In 2017, Gutierrez was included in a large exhibition at the Hammer Museum entitled "Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985.
These are conveyed in Gutiérrez’s artwork that was displayed that showed a faceless women hung upside down, Y con unos lazos me izaron.
Valencia Diago wrote that Gutiérrez was evolving as an artist and moved from abstractionism to academism with a sense of spontaneity that would make her art more interesting and attract people.
They both are bound with rope around their ankles and hung upside down, serving as evidence of the torture that the citizens were enduring those times.
This painting is an unusual image of a woman suspended horizontally from a thick rope and ties her right leg and hands to her back with firm knots.