Biography

Censorship and isolation

The following year, Debora Arango held her first individual exhibition at the Teatro Colón in Bogotá at the invitation of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, then Minister of Education. However, the exhibition was dismantled the following day under moral and political pressure from the capital's high society, especially from conservative politician Laureano Gómez who considered her nudes "immoral, perverse, pornographic, and technically incorrect." In 1944, Arango and other artists form a group Los Independientes, claiming for themselves an Americanist art for the people. In the group's first and only exhibition, organized by the Society of Public Improvements, their most controversial works were censored.