Abel Rodríguez, a Nonuya artist who translated his knowledge of plants in the Amazon into drawings that were shown widely at international biennials, making him one of the most famous artists in Colombia, has died in Bogotá. His gallery, Instituto de Visión, announced his passing on Thursday, but did not specify an age or a cause of death.
The gallery said that Rodríguez, who was sometimes called Don Abel, “passed away peacefully, surrounded by his devoted family and holding the hand of Doña Elisa, his soulmate and the love of his life.” His family includes his son Wilson Rodríguez, an artist who works under the name Aycoobo.
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Abel Rodríguez has in the past decade become a star of the international biennial circuit, with appearances in recent editions of Documenta, the Gwangju Biennale, the Biennale of Sydney, the Bienal de São Paulo, the Toronto Biennial of Art, and the Carnegie International. Last year, he appeared in the Venice Biennale alongside Aycoobo.
At these biennials, Rodríguez showed his ink drawings of trees and other plants in the Amazonian rainforest. Spare in style and rich with resonance, these drawings represent leaves through little flicks of green ink and trunks through thin watercolor washes. An array of birds can often be seen amid the greenery.
In other drawings and paintings, Rodríguez depicted plants seen in isolation from their ecosystem, writing out information about each fern represented. While these works may look like the taxonomic imagery associated with Western botany, Rodríguez intended his art as a means of recording Indigenous knowledge.
“Remaking plants in my drawings reminds me of the passing of generations, of having a child,” he said in a 2024 interview for the Museum of Modern Art. “We call our thoughts children—spiritual children who are always with us. You try to capture that figure or harvest the same as it was before, but it will never be the same.”
Even though Rodríguez has been readily embraced by the art world, he did not necessarily consider himself a contemporary artist as defined by the West. “We don’t really have that concept, but the closest one I can think of is iimitya, which in Muinane means ‘word of power’—all paths lead to the same knowledge, which is the beginning of all paths,” he told curator José Roca when he was included in Documenta 14 in 2017.
Rodríguez was born Mogaje Guihu along the Cahuinarí River in La Chorrera, Colombia. (His birth year has tended to vary widely, with his CV listing 1941 even though Instituto de Visión said today that he was born in 1934.) He was raised by the Muinane people, and he learned about plants from his uncle, a sabredor who amassed a vast knowledge of wildlife.
Rodríguez would later direct his uncle’s knowledge toward helping his people facilitate the chagra, or a two-year farming system during which plants were extracted and then raised anew, in an attempt restore the forest after having utilized its material for one’s purposes.
In 1959, when the inhabitants of Guihu’s village were officially registered, he had to take on a Spanish name. “They gave me the name Rodríguez after a boss my father had, but I have no idea what it means,” he said in the MoMA interview. Mogaje Guihu meant “shining sparrow-hawk feathers.”
During the 1980s, Rodríguez met Carlos Rodríguez, a biologist with the Fundación Tropenbos Colombia, a Dutch NGO that aspires to support biodiversity in Colombia. According to NPR, Abel helped Fundación Tropenbos Colombia representatives identify local plants and determine which ones had medical purposes.
Then, during the ’90s, amid a period of armed conflict, Rodríguez was forced to leave the rainforest. He resettled in what José Roca described as one of Bogota’s “poverty-ridden peripheral neighborhoods.” There, he reconnected with Carlos Rodríguez, who provided Abel with the tools to begin making art. “I had never drawn before, I barely knew how to write, but I had a whole world in my mind asking me to picture the plants,” he once told a Fundación Tropenbos interviewer.
Initially, Rodríguez said, his art “looked ugly,” as he recalled in the MoMA interview. “But what mattered was going to the forest in my thoughts and mind, and speaking and naming from there. Once I am there, I write down the colors and scents, where they are, what animals eat them and when they rot. The translation is not easy—there are a lot of names I know in my language that I am not sure how to turn into Spanish. The paintings help me translate without words, to communicate what’s in my mind, and to show it in a way people understand.”
He would go on to create works that tell the stories of the forest—its creation and its plants, and ways to continue nourishing it.
Rodríguez was not widely known to the art world until 2008, the year he appeared in a group show at Bogotá’s Museo Botero. Five years later, he appeared in “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art,” an acclaimed and influential show held at Canada’s National Gallery of Art.
Yet despite his many appearances in important shows and big biennials, he continually reaffirmed that his drawings and paintings were more than just art objects. “In my language, we speak of knowledge, work, intelligence, and craft—that is what is behind images,” he told his MoMA interviewer. “Art? I don’t think so.”