Despite Santiago Londoño Vélez's assertion that ‘fue con una serie de grandes desnudos femeninos naturalistas [que Arango] alteró el canon académico vigente en la representación del cuerpo femenino’ (Arte colombiano, p. 240), there has been no detailed critical appraisal of the nude in her work. Breaking away from the academicist pictorial tradition which still dominated the Colombian artistic milieu, Arango's work constitutes a trangression of the formal and aesthetic visual codes which Linda Nochlin in her essay ‘Women, Art, and Power’ argues have inscribed the female form in western art with the ideology of gender difference.

The critic Álvaro Robayo Alonso separates Arango's nudes into two groups: the more conservative, academic watercolours, and the oil paintings in which a more transgressive language is appropriated (p. 29). Whilst this categorization is not as discrete as Robayo Alonso contends, there do emerge from Arango's work different treatments of the female nude: one in which it is contained, a socialized and docile body, and one in which colour and texture threaten excess and overflowing, and in which the female body's limits in turn become porous and threaten rupture. In this second group of paintings, there is a suggestion of nearness to a maternal body, to a pre-symbolic state, and this contrasts sharply with the socialized body of the first group, in which objects and surroundings place the body firmly within the context of the symbolic.