Adriana Duque (Manizales, Colombia, 1968) lives and works in Bogotá. A graduate in Fine Arts from the Universidad de Caldas, she has worked with photography since the early 2000s, employing the medium as a means of revisiting classical European painting, with references spanning the Renaissance to the Baroque.
Her work centers on portraits of children and young people, especially girls, in meticulously constructed scenes that evoke the austere aesthetic of fairy tales and the iconography of European royalty. The props, extravagant adornments, and high contrast of the images engage in dialogue with Dutch Baroque painting and with masters of the 14th and 15th centuries. The compositions favor the depiction of a single figure, imbuing the images with a symbolic sense of individuality and introspection.
Duque's process combines manual techniques with digital resources. Each scene originates in the artist's imagination and is physically constructed: she herself makes the sets, props, and embroidered elements that will be photographed. After the shoot, layers of digital painting are applied to the image, a step that heightens the mysticism of the figures. The sober palette, the children's apprehensive gaze, and the fable-like atmosphere compose a poetics based on ambiguity, in which purity and unease coexist within the same scene.
Her works are held in collections such as the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, the Coleção Figueiredo Ferraz (Ribeirão Preto), the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño (Bogotá), and the 21c Museum Hotel (Louisville). Her solo exhibitions include Renascimento (Zipper Galeria, 2019), Iconos (Zipper Galeria, 2014), Anthology of an Obsession (Witzenhausen Gallery, Amsterdam, 2014), Infantes (Galeria Horrach Moya, Mallorca, 2010), Baroque Children (Museo Iglesia Santa Clara, Bogotá, 2009), and De Cuento en Cuento (Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, 2005). She took part in Photoquai (Biennale de Photographie) at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris, 2013), Desnudando a Eva at the Instituto Cervantes (Madrid, 2012), and the Salón Nacional de Artistas (Bogotá, 2005).