Taxonomy of Memory: Soft Gradients
2025 · Watercolor on cotton paper · 50.8 × 35.6 cm
View in the viewing room ↗Angie Mueller investigates how we construct memory and what happens when machines begin to remember for us. Her research grows out of a search for her roots: her childhood diaries, her family tree, and the stories of the women in her family who worked in textile factories in the Colombian Caribbean. Through drawing and painting, she explores clothing as an archive of identity, labor, and women’s experiences.
Her practice places the trace of the hand and the time of painting in tension with new technologies. By transforming her images into animations and interactive environments, she examines what is preserved, lost, or altered when a memory becomes digital information.
This inquiry takes form in The Wall, a system in development that invites others to share memories of the places they come from. Across drawing, painting, and digital media, Mueller explores remembering as a form of resistance: maintaining a personal relationship with the past in a world that increasingly entrusts its memory to machines.
"The MEAM Hall: 8th edition" is open now in Barcelona. The MEAM (Museu Europeu d'Art Modern) presents it as its small-format collective exhibition — "the largest showcase of contemporary figurative art in small format." Organized by the Fundació de les Arts i els Artistes, this edition brings together 161 selected artists in 20 × 20 cm format, exhibited in the museum's main hall. Rangel participates with "Nuevos Horizontes" (oil on canvas, 20 × 20 cm).
· MEAM, Barcelona — July 10 to November 1, 2026 (opening and certificate ceremony: July 10).
· La Zona Gallery, Madrid — November 12 to 29, 2026.
Text by Uncool Gallery
Angie Rangel’s Taxonomy of Memory series develops from garments associated with childhood and family memory. Taxonomy of Memory: Soft Gradients and Near Abstraction from the “Taxonomy of Memory” Series transform these sources through drawing, allowing domestic objects to become carriers of cultural experience.
— Uncool Gallery, Across the Americas, Artsy, 2026
September 22 – October 19, 2026
Across the Americas brings together ten works by Dante Migone-Ojeda, Nelmir Guzman, Angie Rangel, Hannah Banciella, and Marco Caridad. The exhibition considers how cultural memory travels across generations and geography, taking new form through contemporary artistic practice.
2025 · Watercolor on cotton paper · 50.8 × 35.6 cm
View in the viewing room ↗
2025 · Watercolor on cotton paper · 50.8 × 35.6 cm
View in the viewing room ↗Brooklyn Navy Yard, New York, 2025
My residency at Uncool Artist, based at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was transformative on both a personal and artistic level. During this period, I became deeply aware of new ethical frameworks in contemporary art production, and more importantly, of how my work is understood within a global context.
"Her paintings act like an archive of personal experiences, memories, and desires. Rangel blends elements of folklore, art history, and family narrative to construct compositions rich with her own lore, welcoming viewers into the period rooms of her mind which encourage us all to reflect on our own constellations of personal inspirations."
— Julian J. Howard, Curator
There is a Greek myth that places the origin of painting in the hands of a woman. In Pliny the Elder's Natural History, there is an account about the origin of painting in which a maiden named Kora traces the outline of her lover's shadow before he leaves for war. Whether the myth is true or only legend, what is undeniable is that painting has always been a worker of memory, helping preserve what we consider of great value. Vincent wanted to preserve his boots, Séraphine Louis wanted to preserve her flowers, and Modigliani his beloved women.
— Úrsula Ochoa, Master in Aesthetics, Art curator and critic
Angie Mueller, born Angie del Carmen Rangel Peñaloza in Barranquilla, Colombia, is a visual artist whose work is also presented under the name Angie Rangel. Based between the San Francisco Bay Area and Colombia, she brings painting, textiles, and digital media together to create new forms of storytelling.
With a background in Fine Arts, Rangel draws on family memory and the Colombian Caribbean to construct alternative universes where the body, clothing, and hybrid creatures become expressions of identity and transformation.
Conceptual prototype for a monumental sculpture: a crocodile with monarch butterfly wings. A study in magical realism, cultural memory, and the intersection of Caribbean mythology with contemporary sculptural practice.
Digital Explorations · Selected Works
Rangel brings the discipline of traditional painting into dialogue with animation and generative technologies, preserving the authority of the handmade mark while opening new visual landscapes of movement, memory, and migration. Developed in California from a Colombian perspective, this research positions her practice at a pioneering intersection of Latin American painting and emerging media.
Angie Rangel presented Leave a Memory during Colombia's Independence celebration in San Francisco, with the participation of Sonia Marina Pereira Portilla, Consul General of Colombia. Through the artwork and a public invitation to leave a personal memory, Rangel brought her research on memory and migration into a collective setting—strengthening the institutional visibility and community impact of her practice.
Angie Rangel with her work at Colombia’s Independence celebration in San Francisco.
Angie Rangel during a glassmaking workshop at Mazzega Murano Glass Factory, Murano Island, Venice. February 2026.
Barcelona, July 10, 2026 — Opening night of "The MEAM Hall: 8th edition" at the Museu Europeu d'Art Modern. 161 works in 20 × 20 cm format fill the museum's main hall; Rangel's "Nuevos Horizontes" is among the selected pieces. On view through November 1, then at La Zona Gallery, Madrid.
Photography: Natalia Correa, director of DATARTE — The MEAM Hall opening night
Across the Americas, presented by Uncool Gallery on Artsy, includes Soft Gradients and Near Abstraction. September 22 – October 19, 2026.
Encuentro DATARTE at Sala de Arte Bancolombia, Bogotá, Colombia. January 2026.
The Immersive Room is born in the California Bay Area — the place where the technology that redefines how the world sees is invented. Here, where the algorithms are written, Rangel proposes stepping inside the painting: a dark gallery of ten-meter walls where her oils — surreal interiors, botanical dresses, gold against ultramarine blue — are projected floor to ceiling and flow like a slow river, dissolving into one another without cuts. Monarch-winged caimans lift off the canvas and the room travels into open space: ringed planets, a golden city on the Moon. No screen, no frame: the visitor stands inside the work. That is ultra-contemporary — the painter's hand and generative processes in a single experience you inhabit, not observe.