Álvaro Barrios
Barranquilla, Colombia, 1945.
Lives and works in Barranquilla, Colombia.
Álvaro Barrios began his career as a conceptual artist to, from the seventies onwards, develop a body of work influenced by Pop Art in which the aesthetics of comics with marked lines, texts and bright colours is the protagonist. Another of his influences is the figure of Marcel Duchamp for who he is fascinated to the point of appropriating and reinterpreting the iconic piece of the master, Fuente, in his canvases and sculptures. Álvaro Barrios' themes are full of paradoxes and a sense of humour. From his hometown, Cartagena, he moved to Italy in 1966, where he studied at the Universitá di Perugia and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini di Venezia. His travels in Europe and the States gave him an extensive knowledge of modern and contemporary Western art.
Alvaro Barrio’s work is represented in numerous private and public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Wifredo Lam Center, Havana, Cuba; and the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, Washington, DC. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art, MOMA in New York acquired 76 pieces from his Popular Engravings series for its collection of Latin American art.