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. 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. Obsessed with the performativity of identity, his work queered fantasies of the self, oscillating between the point of view of icon and superfan.

International travel throughout his career led to another ritual, that of a video work in every place he visited, frequently shot and edited in one day. These pieces, often involving the artist lip-synching to the most popular song in that time and place, act both as postcards to be sent back and souvenirs to be treasured: deflating the international artist ego into that of tourist.

Alongside his visual practice, Echeverri was 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.