Barrios, Álvaro

Conceptual artist, draftsman, and printmaker. He entered the University of the Atlantic and studied architecture for three years simultaneously, continuing to take courses and workshops at the School of Fine Arts, where he had Freda Sargent as his watercolor teacher. He suspended his studies to travel to Italy, where he studied art history at the Universitá Italiana Per Stranieri in Perugia and at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice (1967-1968). Barrios is one of the artists launched by Marta Traba. He held his first major exhibition in 1966 at the Colseguros Gallery in Bogotá, directed by Alicia Baraibar; the show was presented by Gonzalo Arango. A year later, he held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá. His early works are sepia drawings on tea-stained paper, inspired by the Dick Tracy comic strip, and some collages from magazines. In 1968, he proposed to Marta Traba the exhibition "Ambient Spaces," the first show of conceptual art in the country. Participants included Feliza Bursztyn, Santiago Cárdenas, Bernardo Salcedo, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, and Alvaro Barrios, but the works were destroyed by students from the National University the day after the opening. In 1969, Barrios received the third prize at the XX National Visual Arts Salon, and in 1979, the first prize at the First Latin American Print Triennial in Buenos Aires. He has held a series of solo exhibitions, including two retrospective shows at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá (1977 and 1986), and has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Sixth Paris Biennial (1971), the Ninth Tokyo Biennial (1974), and the Thirteenth São Paulo Biennial (1975). Barrios is a unique artist within the national landscape. "...he was the Colombian artist who was most interested (...) in creating a space of recognition for conceptual art (...) in the Colombian Caribbean". (Santiago Rueda).