María Berrío
A Sunburst Restrained, 2019
collage with Japanese paper and watercolor on canvas
152.4 x 182.9 cm (60 x 72 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Erika and John Toussaint
2020.2.1

The Gallery has acquired its first work by Colombian artist María Berrío (b. 1982), who is known for her luminous collages of Japanese papers painted with watercolor. She arranges the collages to depict female figures in spaces of refuge and imagined utopias that incorporate the cultural influences and flora of South America.

In A Sunburst Restrained (2019) two female figures recline in a tiled setting. A fluid pink ground fills the bottom third of the composition, over which a branch full of leaves and lemons appears, cutting across the foreground and cropped by the bottom edge of the canvas. The artist attributes her inspiration for this work to Pablo Neruda’s poem "Ode to a Lemon," which links the greatness of celestial light to the modest but life-affirming form of a lemon. Berrío has imbued her rendering of the two women and the lemons with such barely contained vitality and light.