Behind the Rise of Contemporary Peruvian Art

In January, Antonio Paucar won the Artes Mundi Prize; his work was shown across multiple venues in Wales. That same month, Andrea Canepa wrapped Madrid’s Palacio de Cristal, part of the Reina Sofía Museum, with an installation that will remain in place through 2026. In February, Grimanesa Amorós unveiled two large-scale commissions—one at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and another in New York’s Wall Street district—while Ximena Garrido-Lecca opened a major solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio. And in March, Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, who represented Spain at the last Venice Biennale, opened her first retrospective at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, directed by Adriano Pedrosa.

None of them are new to the international scene, but having so many awards, exhibitions and institutional projects involving Peruvian contemporary art and artists happening in such a short time is striking and points to growing visibility for Peruvian talent and Andean cosmologies. Based on indigenous knowledge and ancestral worldviews, these perspectives highlight the relationship between environment, territory and colonial memory through contemporary artistic practices.

Many contemporary Peruvian artists live and work abroad, in Berlin, New York, Madrid or Mexico City, while maintaining strong ties to Lima and other parts of Peru. Some also move between Peru and these international contexts. Born in Huancayo, Paucar developed his practice between Peru and Germany. “My work comes from the Andes; it is connected to my Andean reality, to its worldview, to my region, and to my people,” Paucar told Observer. During his formative years in Germany, “popular art was marginalized and had no place.” Yet this distance allowed him to see his work more clearly. “It helped me understand my roots and shape my work from that perspective.”

That work, which was most recently shown as part of the “Artes Mundi 11 Finalists Exhibition” at the National Museum Cardiff and Chapter Arts Centre in Wales, speaks to themes both universal and regional. In his video performance El Corazón de la Montaña, created on the Huaytapallana mountain range, the artist writes a phrase in his native language, Quechua wanka, using his own blood, while his body remains exposed to the freezing cold in an area under threat from significant glacier retreat, loss of water resources and ecological damage.

Is the wave of recognition truly a boom?

Amorós, a multimedia artist known for her large-scale light installations combining technology, architecture and public space, sees the recent rise in attention as “just a coincidence. Peruvian artists have always been producing work. Perhaps there has been more attention on Mexican, Brazilian, or Argentine artists. I believe that the contemporary art scene in Peru has been one of the last to take off in the region.” She recently unveiled Radiance, an installation created in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic that illuminated the Walt Disney Concert Hall. “Being from Peru has given me a strong connection to history, rituals, and symbolism, but living in New York has taught me to think globally and to work on a large scale,” she told Observer. For her, “what has changed is the digital sphere, which has clearly increased visibility.”

Gamarra Heshiki, who was born in Lima but has lived in Madrid for years, shares this view: “I believe that, slowly and somewhat belatedly, there has been greater visibility for Peruvian artists from the Andes and the Amazon. I’m not sure whether there has been a structural change in the international art system, but I do think the reception of these works has shifted due to social media… There has been no strong structure to support circulation from within Peru, much less internationally. Instead, the rise of new information networks has brought greater visibility to a wide range of artists of different generations, many of whom have developed a strong body of work over time.”

Peru has a relatively limited institutional infrastructure for contemporary art compared to other countries in the region, and there’s been ongoing political instability. The country has had eight presidents in the past decade; none since 2016 has completed a full term. In early March, Gamarra Heshiki opened “Réplica,” her first retrospective, which revisits images from the Western canon to question the hierarchies and narratives upheld by traditional museums. Lima-born Canepa, in contrast, turns to the structures that support them in Fardo, an installation that fully covers the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, part of the Reina Sofía Museum, currently under restoration in El Retiro Park.

For it, she wrapped the iron-and-glass structure in a printed surface inspired by pre-Columbian funerary textiles from the Paracas culture, in which bodies were covered in multiple layers of cloth. “The work enters into dialogue with a knowledge system that has often been displaced or misunderstood within Western institutions,” Canepa told Observer, adding that presenting the project at the Palacio de Cristal allows it to exist within the very structures that once displayed and classified other cultures. But, as she pointed out, international attention often moves in cycles across the Global South and that Peru is likely part of that dynamic.

At the same time, institutions are increasingly under pressure to reconsider how they position themselves in relation to other histories and forms of knowledge, though whether this will lead to lasting change remains uncertain. At the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, Garrido-Lecca’s exhibition “Seedings” brings together installations with seeds, plants and fibers to contrast ancestral agricultural knowledge with contemporary systems of extraction and production. “I don’t see my work as representing Andean or Mesoamerican knowledge,” Garrido-Lecca told Observer. “Instead, I place this knowledge and its symbolism in tension with modern infrastructures and colonial systems, to create a space for reflection.”

For her, what has changed most is how the work is received globally. But she cautioned that Andean cosmology should not be treated as an aesthetic resource but as a worldview shaped by material histories of extraction, labor and resistance. She also questioned whether this moment signals a deeper transformation in the international art system. “I would hesitate to call it a structural change,” she said. “When that change does happen, I hope it will not be measured by the number of Peruvian artists exhibiting abroad, but by a real redistribution of value, authorship and knowledge.”

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