Manuel Calderón
Bio
Manuel Calderón (Bogotá, 1985) has a Bachelor of Fine Art from the National University of Colombia and an Honourable Mention from the Master in Research, Art and Creation from the Complutense University of Madrid. At ARCO 2015, with Colombia as a guest country, Manuel Calderón was selected to present his project “In Boxes” at the stand of the El Museo Gallery in Bogota. In 2012 he was the winner of the First Acquisition Prize EFG Bank and Art Nexus Magazine, one of the most important awards in the Latin American artistic context. In 2011, he received an honourable mention in the V Bidimensional Art Salon of the Gilberto Alzate Avendaño Foundation.
His work has been presented in several exhibitions and fairs since 2009 with the El Museo Gallery in Bogotá, at the Fernando Pradilla Gallery in Madrid, and at different artistic events in London, Paris, Barcelona, Sao Paulo, Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile and Miami.
Statement
Manuel Calderón is a drawer, an artist who keeps the understanding of drawing latent in its classical sense, but from that same latency he seeks how to pervert it. Calderón is an obsessive observer, a student of the visual and its multiple forms of representation, always using academic and ancestral elements such as: pencil, charcoal, pastel or ink. For a long time the artist has investigated the language of photorealism amazed by the plausible and illusory aspect of these images. Also his own body in some cases turns out to be the instrument of reference that allows him to penetrate the intimate of the individual. His self-portraits manage to contain a universal thought on matters of art and man in their relationship with the world. His space for thought is the making itself, the act of drawing and creating for unlimited times where his findings originate. He does not make sketches because the ideas are planned in his mind.
2.5 x 4m / 98.4 x 157 in
