The past that dwells within us

A swimming pool viewed from above, an old television, a Pinocchio seemingly displaced from his own story, the ruins of a city, or bodies searching for their place in an unfamiliar reality. The images that make up Nostalgia evoke seemingly everyday experiences that, upon closer inspection, reveal something deeper: the way we construct our identity from the places we inhabit, the stories we inherit, and the memories we cherish.

The exhibition, on view at Gallery Poulsen in Copenhagen from September 26 to November 7, 2026, brings together five artists connected to the contemporary Colombian art scene, curated by artist Germán Téllez. Through diverse languages and sensibilities, Germán Téllez, Gonzalo García Gaitán, Esteban Ocampo, José Rosero, and Gabriel Angel explore the relationships between memory, visual culture, belonging, and transformation. This is the first group exhibition the Danish gallery has dedicated to artists with roots in Colombia, offering an opportunity to engage with the diverse perspectives that permeate their practices.

• Esteban Ocampo 'Swimming Pool with Palm Trees' 2026.

In Nostalgia , the past doesn't appear as a closed territory to which we can return, but as a presence that continues to shape how we interpret the present. Everyday objects, images, and spaces function as repositories of personal and collective experiences. A television can evoke a time when the screen brought the family together around the same programming; a swimming pool can trigger memories of summers gone by; an abandoned building can preserve the traces of a life that is no more. However, what we recognize can also become strange when our expectations clash with reality.

In a world undergoing constant change, nostalgia arises as a response to the loss of familiar reference points. Technological acceleration renders obsolete objects that until recently seemed indispensable, while urban spaces and ways of living together are transformed. Even our perception of the world is conditioned by images and narratives that change over time. The desire to cling to the familiar can thus become a form of resistance to uncertainty, but also an opportunity to critically examine what we remember and the ideas we take for granted.

• Gabriel Angel 'Pinocchios Fort-da' 2026.

The work of Germán Téllez (Bogotá, 1986), the project's founder and curator, stems from the experience of alienation and the search for one's own place. His paintings depict hands and bodies reaching out, striving to grasp something, or seemingly orienting themselves in an environment that doesn't always meet their expectations. Drawing on his experience as a migrant in the United States, the artist explores the encounter between his culture of origin and the social codes, customs, and ideas of his adopted country. His images are situated at the point of friction between imagined life and lived reality, between the identity one carries within and the one that is redefined in contact with a new context.

Memory also permeates the work of Gonzalo García Gaitán (Bogotá, 1981), who investigates the influence of technology and mass media on our perception of the world. In the series Panopticopias , vintage televisions become the protagonists of a reflection on visual culture and domestic life. Those cathode-ray tube sets, now practically extinct in homes, were for decades privileged windows onto the political, cultural, and personal events that shaped the collective imagination. García Gaitán recovers their presence through watercolor, a slow, manual technique that contrasts with the speed of television images. The obsolescence of the device does not, however, imply the disappearance of the discourses and imaginaries it helped to disseminate.

In the paintings of Esteban Ocampo (Manizales, 1987), memory is constructed from recognizable scenes of everyday life. Swimming pools, family, soccer games, and summer vacations form a visual repertoire that seems suspended in an indeterminate time and space. Aerial perspective transforms these familiar images into compositions bordering on abstraction, shifting the focus from the anecdote to the visual structure of the memory. His works suggest that personal memory is never entirely individual: it is a confluence of intimate experiences, shared images, and cultural references that shape how we remember.

• German Tellez 'Study of a Skull' 2026.

José Rosero (Pasto, 1988), for his part, turns his gaze toward abandoned or dilapidated places, spaces where the absence of their former inhabitants has not completely erased the traces of a previous life. His surrealist paintings move between past and present, the familiar and the unsettling. Figures and objects burst into scenes that seem suspended outside of time, opening up new possibilities for interpretation. The ruin ceases to be merely the testament to a disappearance and becomes a territory of transformation, capable of embracing other meanings and forms of existence.

Gabriel Angel (Bogotá, 1992) extends this reflection to the images, myths, and narratives that contribute to the construction of our collective imagination. His paintings combine references from art history, popular culture, and the visual world of childhood, articulating motifs from different eras and contexts. Icons and familiar narratives appear as vehicles of meaning transmitted from early childhood, contributing to the establishment of norms, desires, and expectations about who we should be. The artist also examines how ideas related to desire and eroticism change when a motif from ancient mythology is incorporated into contemporary visual culture.

The five proposals gathered in Nostalgia do not offer a uniform vision of the past, nor do they propose an idealized return to a lost time. On the contrary, they explore the contradictions that arise when memories are confronted with the transformations of the present. Objects become emotional archives; spaces, settings of belonging and displacement; and inherited images, cultural constructs open to re-examination.