The Brooklyn Rail

Eight years after her last New York show, Brooklyn-based artist María Berrío has filled Hauser & Wirth with works that celebrate her native Colombia. Soliloquy of the Wounded Earth presents large-scale canvases rife with movement and color, illuminating a world where ancient myths confront contemporary realities. Berrío takes the Greek Fates—those ancient arbiters of human destiny—and translates them into Colombian cumbia dancers, whose vibrant skirts swirl with possibility.

Three works in the exhibition depict Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, the three Fates, who traditionally measure and cut the so-called thread of human life. Positioned as a central triptych in the gallery’s main room, the works dominate the space with their saturated colors and commanding presence. Berrío’s Fates wear elaborate Colombian folk costumes: skirts decorated in brilliant reds, blues, and whites, each figure manipulating iridescent ribbons in lieu of the classical threads of destiny. Standing before these works, audiences find themselves at eye level with the dancers, creating an intimate encounter that feels both ceremonial and immediate. Where the original Fates represented predetermined fate, Berrío’s dancers embody agency and cultural recognition.

This connects to political theorist Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, or the idea that human birth introduces the possibility of new beginnings that can rupture deterministic cycles. Berrío's dancing Fates visualize this philosophy in that they don’t cut threads but unfurl them, thereby creating space for the unexpected. The blue ribbons they manipulate become symbols of potential rather than limitation, or threads that can be rewoven rather than simply severed.

Berrío’s technique reinforces these themes. Working with watercolor and Japanese paper collage on linen, she builds compositions through an intuitive layering process. The very method of collage, according to the artist, mirrors the immigrant experience of rebuilding identity from fragments. This is a process Berrío knows intimately, having moved from Colombia to New York twenty-five years ago during her country’s tumultuous drug war.

The paper’s own materiality offers physical presence and meaning. Up close, the layered Japanese papers create subtle textures that shift as the viewer moves around each work. Berrío was drawn to their “beautiful, colorful brushstrokes,” a cultural synthesis joining Colombian, American, and Japanese traditions. The delicate edges of torn paper are visible throughout the compositions, which highlights the fragility inherent in both the medium and the immigrant experience it suggests.

The Ground of Being (all works 2025) offers the clearest visualization of Arendt’s natality concept. In the work, a stoic young girl in a cerulean dress floats among streaming flags and a busy procession below. The painting’s vertical format emphasizes her levitation, while the dense crowd creates a sense of earthbound chaos from which the work’s main subject has transcended. The girl’s calm presence above competing banners visualizes the capacity for new beginnings that Arendt saw as humanity’s greatest gift.

Edge of the Salted Plains extends the exhibition’s central metaphor. The horizontal composition includes figures whose banners create a riot of color and pattern that nearly overwhelms the eye. Cavalrymen transporting banners crowd the frame, which suggests either imminent battle or its aftermath. The work illustrates the broader narrative that humans have seized the Fates’ threads and woven them into flags that become objects of worship, then sources of conflict, and leave what Berrío views as a charred landscape, with the remnants of flags stitched together to form “bandages and shelters.” The figures seem to inhabit the same physical space as the public, their direct gazes creating moments of recognition, not looking down from authority or up in supplication, but meeting audiences as equals.

Soliloquy of the Wounded Earth, the show’s titular work, commands an entire wall. The collage presents a lone rider on a horse traversing billboards and urban debris. The scale makes the viewer feel small within the landscape of commercial imagery, while the subject provides a focal point of calm. The composition captures the search for meaning amid information overload. The elegant rider, calm and purposeful, offers a compass in the muck of competing messages and consumerist noise.

Soliloquy of the Wounded Earth presents a world where ancient certainties have been overturned, and where fate is redirected by human hands. Berrío’s wounded earth doesn’t represent despair as much as it does potential, or a place where new myths can be written. Her dancing Fates suggest that even fundamental narratives can pivot, and that destiny might be more malleable than we assume.