Federico Ovalles
Bio
Federico Ovalles was born in Caracas in 1972. He studied drawing, painting and sculpture at the Escuela de Artes Cristóbal Rojas and the Instituto de Artes Visuales Armando Reverón (IUESAPAR). In 1996 he settled in London for six years, studying drawing and painting at Westminster College, video art at Camberwell School of Art, art and computing at Tower Hamlet College and printmaking at the London College of Printing.
Lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia
Statement
I am interested in working with divergent ideas between triumphs and failures of Latin American modernity and its consequences, expressed in those areas of the current city that function as "non-city" and in contrast with the architectural majesty of great works that erected the modern Latin American city of the mid-twentieth century. The main axes of my observation and exploration are architecture, geometry, abstractionism and historical constructivism, approaching it beyond tradition, through immediacy, provisionality, spontaneous order and constructive precariousness that so much marks the reality in the present of Latin America. I counterpose dissimilar materials to create pieces of assemblage and installations that reference the architectural in a fragile or provisional way, I also build geometries on fabrics or natural fibers and with materials found in the city.
