paulina moncada | Oolong Gallery

Just as in petroglyphs, through her practice Paulina uncovers subjects of landscape as containers of meaning, drawing questions about placehood and personhood while gradually reconsidering and revisiting ecosystems. Moncada works across painting, sculpture, and installation to portray fragile and inconspicuous encounters between human and non-human life. Her roots are planted in the entangled Andean Tropics, a place where absence and presence become signs of possibility. Tropical nature enters Paulina’s practice as a language of reciprocity, correspondence and reverberation. Through speculation about the function of the artistic object she invites the viewer to preserve mysteries instead of solving them. Paulina Moncada explores time, symbols, and the semiotic landscapes of the Andean mountains. She investigates ecosystems as fields of meaning, maps silent encounters between animals and humans, land and diagrams, ordinary objects and idiosyncratic collections. Playing with figures that blend interior spaces that look like exteriors, or still-lifes that resemble astronomical entities, her work questions different notions of time, placehood, and personhood. For Moncada, painting is an atlas, where absence and presence are signs of possibility.Paulina Moncada (b.1998, Caldas, Antioquia, Colombia) works in painting, sculpture and installation to revisit notions of landscape in the Americas, specifically the Andean Tropics. Echoing the layered language of the Andes, Moncada stacks textures, colors, places and times to portray subtle encounters between human and non-human life. In her paintings absence and presence become possibilities to contrast human perception with what’s beyond it. She received an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University (2025) where she was awarded the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award, and a BFA from University of the Andes. Selected exhibitions include Latitude Gallery, NY (2026), Perrotin Gallery, NY (2025) and the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá (2019), as well as the NADA NY Art Fair with Oolong Gallery (2026). Lives and works in New York 2025 MFA Yale School of Art Painting/Printmaking New Haven, CT 2020 BFA University of the Andes Bogotá, Colombia