Twenty years after the death of Débora Arango, Colombia turns its gaze back to an artist who broke silences when almost no one dared to do so. Her work, shaped by a critical eye on the country and a deep social sensibility, continues to resonate with new generations who find in her a voice ahead of its time. Her painting, misunderstood in its era and celebrated only belatedly, left a mark that is now impossible to ignore.
Arango was much more than a painter of uncomfortable subjects: she was a woman who understood art as an act of conscience. From her early expressionist portraits to her most forceful series on political violence, she placed at the center of the canvas what others preferred to hide. In a country marked by prejudice, she faced attacks, censorship, and isolation, but her work ultimately prevailed through its ethical and aesthetic power.
Beyond her works, Colombia today remembers this transgressive woman through the printing of her image on the 2,000-peso banknotes that the Central Bank has issued since 2016 as part of its currency redesign.
Debora Arango, the transgressive painter of Colombia’s 2,000-peso bill
Débora Arango was born in Envigado, in the metropolitan area of Medellín, in 1907, in a deeply conservative Colombia where the role of women was limited to the private sphere. From a very young age, she showed an inclination for painting and a character that challenged convention.
Her early works, focused on the female body, had already sparked controversy. In a context that expected discipline, silence, and modesty from women, Arango painted nudes that did not seek to idealize but to show real bodies, charged with emotions and tensions. That gesture was enough for her to be labeled irreverent and scandalous.
Over time, her gaze turned toward the country’s politics and social life. In the 1940s and 1950s, when bipartisan violence was devastating entire regions, Arango began to depict on her canvases scenes that spoke of repression, inequality, and collective pain.
Her paintings softened nothing: they showed mistreated bodies, faces marked by fear, and figures of power portrayed as grotesque specters. It was a direct denunciation at a time when criticizing the government could cost one’s life. For that reason, many of her paintings were rejected by institutions that preferred to avoid controversy. However, that same critical force is what today makes her work an irreplaceable historical testimony.
Among her most emblematic works are the Female Nudes, a series of revolutionary paintings that not only questioned gender stereotypes but also spurred a necessary reflection on the autonomy and dignity of the female body.
Another essential piece is La salida de Laureano, a satirical portrayal of the controversial president Laureano Gómez—an admirer of Nazism in the 1940s—that reveals Arango’s openly critical stance toward political power. Likewise, works such as The Train of Death and The Sisga Suicides depict with stark realism the bipartisan violence and social tragedies that defined much of twentieth-century Colombia.
Finally, her series on the situation of women—including paintings like Justice and The Prostitute—constitutes a singular testimony to gender inequality and the moral hypocrisy of the era.
A pioneer of socially conscious art
The themes Arango addressed placed her in an uncomfortable position within the Colombian art scene, dominated by more traditional visions. While other painters preferred to portray landscapes or idealized everyday scenes, she exposed the country’s inequalities with a style that combined Expressionism and Symbolism. Her work spoke of domestic violence, prostitution, urban poverty, political persecution, and the condition of women in a patriarchal society.
In that sense, she was decades ahead of the language of contemporary feminism. Arango painted women who suffered, but also women who resisted. She depicted them confined to roles they had not chosen and trapped by social structures that limited their autonomy. In doing so, she denounced gender inequality in a country that would take a long time to recognize that issue. Today, her work is read as an early manifesto on women’s rights, created from personal experience and direct observation.
Her social awareness was not limited to political themes. She also explored the fractures of everyday life: loneliness, the marginalization of those living on the edges of the city, the pain of victims no one listens to. Her painting, far from being an academic exercise, was a profound commitment to Colombian reality.
After years of controversy and silence, Débora Arango’s work began receiving recognition in the final decades of her life. Exhibitions, studies, and tributes reclaimed her as a key figure in Colombian art. Her name moved from the margins to the place it had always deserved: that of a pioneer who opened paths for women artists and for those who understand art as a tool for critical reflection.
That recognition reached a visible symbol nine years ago, when her image began circulating on the 2,000-peso banknote. Since then, millions of Colombians have held in their hands the face of a woman who fought against censorship and inequality. For many, this gesture represented an act of historical justice, a way of restoring the place society denied her for so long.
He passed away on December 4, 2005, at the age of 98. Two decades after her death, her pioneering work remains relevant because Colombia continues to face many of the dilemmas she portrayed. Social tensions, violence, inequality, and the fight for women’s rights remain part of the public debate.
In that context, her paintings function as an uncomfortable but necessary mirror. Arango did not paint to please, but to awaken consciousness, and that is why her legacy endures far beyond mere scandal in the minds of small worlds.