“Y cuando le preguntaron qué sabía hacer, ella solo dijo la verdad: ‘Sueño.’”
“And when they asked her what she knew how to do, she simply told the truth: ‘I dream.’”
— Gabriel García Márquez, I Sell My Dreams

81 Leonard Gallery is pleased to present Manuela Caicedo’s first solo exhibition Asistente de Morfeo, on view from September 10th to October 24th. Manuela’s work hovers in the space between night and day, between looking and seeing. Classical oil painting is applied with the freedom of dreaming; imagination becomes ethereal image in transparent washes, luminous glazes, and fiery hues. Bridging intuition with philosophy, mythology, and art history, Manuela’s paintings merge inner and outer worlds, appearing in various states of clarity or blissful confusion.

An apt place to begin is with Las Evas, or The Eves. Manuela instills her female subjects with the power and wisdom of mythological and biblical heroines. Working from memory of her grandmother Amanda and referencing art historic depictions of Eve and Mary Magdalene (specifically in paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Artemisia Gentileschi), Manuela imagines Eve as everyone’s grandmother and each woman as inheritor of the fuego (fire)—the powerful life force and generative energy passed down through women. As an inheritor herself, she applies her vision and imagination to each painting, building upon history to open new ways of seeing and understanding. She considers herself Asistente de Morfeo (Morfeus’ Assistant) for this reason. She steps in for the Greek god of dreams as messenger; subconscious creativity becomes the divine.

Sleeping is represented as a portal to this subconscious creativity; the pillow is the door. La Primavera Ardiente (The Fiery Spring) references Edvard Munch’s 1889 painting Spring; however, Manuela’s iteration includes a dog and a flaming red background. In addition to drawing from art history, Greek mythology, and religious iconography, Manuela also builds upon literature and philosophy, including Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism and Spanish philosopher María Zambrano’s concept of razón poética (poetic reasoning). Zambrano’s 1986 essay collection De la aurora (Of the dawn) depicts dawn as an in-between period of unstructured time ripe with potential. Dawn is the threshold where ideas emerge outside of our grasp and slowly transition into understanding. Manuela’s work embodies this in material approach as well as concept. Haziness, blur, and various degrees of rendering suggest the elusiveness of clarity and subtle formation of meaning from what appears before our eyes—and that which does not.

Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, September 10th, from 6–8pm.

Manuela Caicedo (b. 1993, Bogotá, Colombia) is a New York-based artist. In 2022, she earned a degree in Visual Arts from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, where she received a Meritorious Thesis distinction for her first film, I Left Strawberries in My Pocket Until the Day the Suns Go Out. In 2024, she completed an MFA in Painting at the New York Academy of Art, supported by the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Academy Scholar Award. That same year, she undertook a residency at the University of Notre Dame in Kylemore, Ireland, and was awarded the Chubb Fellowship—the highest honor granted by the New York Academy of Art to its alumni—culminating in the Chubb Fellows Show 2025 (New York).

In 2025, she presented Las Dragonas at ARTBO | Salas (Bogotá), participated in Mínima Expresión at Galería Policroma (Medellín), took part in Chubb Fellows and Friends at the Green Family Art Foundation (Dallas), and exhibited at Art Basel 2024 and 2025 (Miami) for the second consecutive year through the Chubb Fellowship. In December 2025, she participated in Between Myth and Memory at 81 Leonard (New York), and in February 2026 in Lenguajes de Papel at Galería El Museo (Bogotá, Colombia).