mario velez

Artist bio

Mario Vélez (b. 1968, Medellín, Colombia) is a Colombian artist with over three decades of sustained artistic practice spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. He studied Fine Arts at the National University of Colombia and continued his education in Europe, studying Drawing at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna before completing a Master’s degree in Painting at the Berlin University of the Arts under German painter Karl Horst Hödicke. This transcontinental formation established a rigorous and distinctive visual language, positioning Vélez as a key figure within contemporary abstraction. His work has been widely exhibited in major museums, galleries, and international art fairs across Latin America, Europe, and the United States, and is held in prominent public, corporate, and private collections worldwide. 

Rooted in painting yet continually expanding beyond its limits, Vélez’s work explores the intersections of color, memory, body, and territory. Drawing from pre-Columbian visual culture, German Expressionism, and abstraction, his practice is characterized by layered surfaces, chromatic intensity, and a dynamic sense of scale that moves between the intimate and the monumental. Across his oeuvre, painting becomes both material and conceptual terrain—a space where traces persist, forms shift, and perception unfolds over time. Through this sustained investigation, Vélez proposes painting as a living system, capable of holding history, landscape, and human experience within a single, resonant visual structure.