Juan Pablo Echeverri (1978-2022) was a renowned contemporary visual artist from Bogotá, Colombia. Working in photography and video, his extensive body of artwork developed from daily self-portraits begun as a teenager into an exploration of how ‘other people’ construct themselves and are constructed in the sight of others. Echeverri imagined people based on the media and lived situations we encounter every day, channeling them into his work. He was interested in how stereotypes coalesce around uniquely individual people, continually experimenting with his own appearance to reject a flattened, essentialist reading of identity.

The quotidian ritual of daily photographs, taken by automatic photobooths wherever he was in the world, fed and ran parallel to numerous photographic projects. Working almost exclusively in series enabled Echeverri to register the limitlessness of human diversity outside of his selection. Obsessed with the performativity of identity, his work queered fantasies of the self, oscillating between the point of view of icon and superfan.

Alongside his visual practice, Echeverri was devoted to music, being an accomplished guitarist and vocalist. He kept multiple collections of carefully classified ephemera from popular culture in his unique art- and music-studio-apartment-gallery, a base that erased all distinction between living and working.