(Popayán, Colombia, 1920 – Bogotá, Colombia, 2012)
Edgar Negret was born in Popayán, Colombia, in 1920. In a country with a number of interesting contemporary painters, Negret is the first sculptor to have an international audience.
At the age of eighteen, he travelled to Cali where he studied at the School of Fine Arts and where he held his first exhibition in 1943. Around 1945 he gave his work a free and symbolic form inspired by the popular legends of his country. This distance from simple figuration was not well received by the local critics and in 1948 he moved to New York, where he lived and worked until 1950. From that year until 1954 he lived in France, exhibited in Paris, took part in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, travelled around Spain and held an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of Madrid. In the couple of years he subsequently spent in Mallorca, he came into possession of the elements of his plastic vocabulary. From manufactured parts, wheels, tubular forms, gears, bolts, screws, etc., he creates polychrome objects that function as a synthesis between the machines of our present-day world and the ritual instruments of the ancient civilisations of his country, especially in the series of Masks and Magic Instruments. In 1956 he moved back to the United States and was appointed professor at the New School of New York. In 1963 he returned to Colombia, first to Cali and then to Bogotá. After returning to his homeland, Negret felt the need to refine his means of working and turned to lamellar aluminium modules that assimilated biological characteristics with poetic force. He was awarded the prize at the Venice Biennale in 1968 and carried out numerous projects for public spaces in different countries.