There’s something quietly magnetic about Manuela Caicedo. She doesn’t perform the role of “the artist” the way one might expect in a city known for its relentless pace and appetite for visibility. She moves differently—attentive, unhurried, present. In a metropolis that thrives on spectacle, Caicedo has built a life around observation, listening, and the subtle art of transforming the invisible into form.
The Colombian-born, New York–based artist speaks softly, yet her words carry the density of someone who has spent years listening to the world before responding to it. Her studio, she says, is only one of many places where her work begins. “Art starts in the pauses,” she reflects. “In the morning light, in the act of reading, in silence. My life is where the work takes shape before I even touch the paper.”
Caicedo’s practice, which spans drawing, painting, and installation, has gained international recognition. She has exhibited in Colombia, the United States, Ireland, and Portugal, in spaces such as Sotheby’s, Belard Gallery, Espacio Odeón, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the recipient of the Chubb Fellowship from the New York Academy of Art and the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant, and her upcoming presentation at the Collectors VIP Lounge at Art Basel Miami 2025 continues her growing dialogue with materiality, transformation, and the unseen.
But accolades aside, Caicedo’s story is not one of linear success. It is one of slow cultivation. Her life and work seem guided by a profound interior rhythm, one that resists the noise and speed of the world around her.
Living as an Artist
For Caicedo, being an artist is not a career. It is a way of paying attention. “The practice of art begins long before you make anything,” she says. “It begins with how you look at the world.”
Her days move with intention. Mornings begin in silence, often with reading or writing before she steps into the studio. “Reading poetry clears the air for me,” she explains. “It softens the mind, makes space for ideas to appear without forcing them.” Her notebooks are filled not only with sketches but with sentences, fragments of language that later resurface in her work.
This blending of image and word is part of her larger philosophy, one that sees imagination not as escape but as a form of knowledge. “Imagination is a way of understanding reality,” she says. “It is like taking the invisible and giving it a body.”
Her process is tactile and poetic. Graphite, oil, and wood act as extensions of her inner landscape. “I enjoy listeing to materials,” she says. “When I cannot fully control the creative act. That is when the dialogue starts.” This trust in process, in the unpredictability of creation, gives her work a pulse that feels human, tender, uncertain, alive.
The Discipline of Intuition
What appears effortless in Caicedo’s finished pieces is the result of a discipline built over years. The routine of the studio, the repetition of gestures, the patience of not knowing, these are her rituals. “It is about showing up every day, even when nothing comes,” she admits. “That is where intuition grows, in persistence.”
She often compares intuition to an animal, animal furioso, as she calls it in her artist statement. “It is wild, fast, and mysterious,” she says. “You cannot control it, you can only nurture it.”
In her eyes, this “animal” is the source of artistic truth. “It reminds me that creation is not about mastery, it is about care,” she says. “About tending to something alive inside you.”
This philosophy extends to how she lives. Meals are slow, often cooked from scratch. The act of preparing food, she says, mirrors the process of drawing: repetition, attention, transformation. “Cooking, reading, making art, they all come from the same place,” she reflects. “They are ways of staying close to life.”
Beauty as Attention
For Caicedo, beauty is not the object observed —it is the one who pays attention. Her practice begins in the simple and radical act of seeing and listening. To look, for her, is to be porous to the world. Each gesture, each layer of paint or line of graphite, holds the trace of a moment that asked to be witnessed.
She finds beauty in the act of perceiving itself: in the way Emily Dickinson describes an ordinary Sunday, in the infinite attempts of Monet and Tacita Dean to understand water, or in James Turrell’s decision to frame a piece of sky. “Art is not about inventing something new,” she says. “It’s about noticing what was already there, waiting to be seen.”
In her work, imagination becomes a form of attention and memory —the act of transforming the phenomenology of perception. Imagination is not always fantastic, but it is always poetic.
The Artist and the World
Despite her introspective nature, Caicedo is not detached from the world. She is deeply engaged with it. Her work often examines what she calls “the invented world,” the human-made systems that define and sometimes confine our lives. “We have built a world that often distances itself from life,” she says. “Art reminds me that there is another way of being, softer, slower, more truthful.”
That tension between what is made and what is felt runs through her drawings like a hidden current. “I seek to unearth what is hidden beneath the surface,” she explains. “To question what we have accepted as true.”
Her reference to “looking for the back of God,” a metaphor she uses to describe her search for deeper truths, captures the essence of her work: an ongoing conversation between the visible and the invisible, the known and the mysterious. “Life itself is supernatural,” she says. “The sun rising every day is the greatest act of magic I know.”
A Life Woven with Meaning
In a world where artists are often measured by output and recognition, Caicedo’s way of living feels radical. Her success is not accidental. It is the quiet accumulation of years spent in deep attention.
When asked what it means to live as an artist, she pauses. “It means living with your senses awake,” she says finally. “To look closely, to accept uncertainty as part of beauty.”
It is not about retreating from the world, but about engaging with it differently, through touch, through presence, through reverence. “To be an artist,” she adds, “is to live as if everything is talking to you.”
And perhaps that is what makes her presence so magnetic. Manuela Caicedo does not chase inspiration; she invites it. Her art, her words, her life all seem guided by the same invisible rhythm: an insistence that the extraordinary is always hiding in the everyday, waiting for someone to notice.
