(Medellín, Colombia, 1932)
This Colombian painter and sculptor was born in Medellín in 1932. He studied in his native city and in 1951 moved to Bogotá, where he held his first solo exhibition. Shortly afterwards he travelled to Madrid, where he attended the San Fernando Academy and devoted himself to copying the works of Goya and Velázquez. Interested in French art of the 18th century, he visited Paris and then Florence, where he studied fresco painting and was awarded the prize of the San Marco Academy in this modality. The influence of the Italians of the Quatrocento and especially of Mantegna was reflected in an intentionally naïve style. In Mexico, under the influence of muralism, he found his own style by discovering the possibilities of increasing the volume of the forms. In 1957 he settled in the United States and resisted the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism with an anachronistic figurative painting of grandiose exuberance. He became famous for his paintings of obese people, in which deformation affects not only people, but also animals and things. In them he introduces a corrosive humour that splashes social hierarchies and institutions. In 1966 he held his first European exhibition, at the Buchholz Gallery in Munich, and six years later he moved to Paris. His exaggerated forms and irreverent intentions were also combined in sculpture, to which he devoted himself almost exclusively in 1976 and 1977. Some critics have argued that what his works have gained in refinement they have lost in aggressiveness and run the risk of becoming an amusing genre style.
His sculptural work has been the subject of several travelling exhibitions, such as the one organised by the Brusberg Gallery of Hannover in 1978, the Smithsonian Institution of Washington in 1979, the Institute Museum of Art of Utica, New York in 1984, the Tokyo Art Gallery of Tokyo in 1986, the Pushkin Museum of Moscow in 1992-93, and so on.
His work is represented in the best museums around the world.