Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar

Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar’s oil paintings can be treated as precursors to his better-known volumetric reliefs and sculptures. Spending a significant amount of time in Paris in the early to mid-1950s, he soon abandoned the portraiture and expressionist style of his formative years in Colombia to assimilate a new postwar visual vocabulary of abstraction and geometry. Influenced by concepts advanced by Jean Dewasne and neoplasticism at the Atelier d’Art Abstrait, and with a background in architecture and fine arts, Ramírez Villamizar became concerned with the relation of interlocking and superimposing planes in the pictorial space. With a high sense of order, Mechanical Composition reflects the artist’s distinctive mid-century geometric abstraction exploration of structure, surface, balance, and rhythm in a dynamic horizontal axis. Limiting his palette to a few flat colors in contrasting tonalities, the circle becomes the organizing device in the abstraction of what could be taken as a mechanical process of an engine or machine or as an orderly structure in perfect harmony and equilibrium. It is this precision in the execution and the tension between planes where the artist found a new personal artistic vision which led to a shifting interest to tri-dimensional work as in the series of white reliefs and his large architectural mural commission El dorado. Created after his one-person show at the Pan American Union in 1956, by this time Ramírez Villamizar’s career was on an ascendant path of hemispheric recognition as one of the first abstract artists of Colombia. Born in Pamplona, an old colonial town of Colombia near the Venezuelan border, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar attended Universidad Nacional in Bogotá where he studied architecture for three years prior to changing his major to fine arts. Although he first ventured into portrait and landscape painting and won second prize in the VII Salón de Artistas Nacionales in 1947, by the end of the 1940s the artist was exploring a new style of expressionism in paintings whose themes of violence and religion signaled the then-current events of his native country. Living in Paris in 1950-1952 and 1954-1956, and traveling to New York, his artwork shifted to reflect his interest in geometry, composition, forms, order, and color. Upon his return to Colombia he joined the faculty of the School of Fine Arts. In 1958 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1959 he took part in the Colombia Section at the V São Paulo Biennial organized by the Universidad de los Andes, along with Botero, Grau, Obregón, Villegas, and Wiedemann, important figures who would dominate international Colombian painting throughout the 1960s and beyond. At this time, however, Ramírez Villamizar’s art had already shifted into a new tri-dimensional exploration of relief and sculpture. He would again return to the São Paulo Biennial in 1969, now as a sculptor in the Colombia Section organized by the National Ministry of Education where he was awarded the second prize in international sculpture, further solidifying his stature and stellar artistic career.