Jaime Avila

Jaime Avila Ferrer is a world-renowned artist whose work combines painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography. He uses mixed media in some pieces such as Dust, in which dots of white paint are applied to a darkened Plexiglas surface to form pictures of urban landscapes from the granulations. Outline for Dust is an artwork in which he connects the cityscape of Bogota with the JFK airport in New York. He uses traditional approaches to examine social, political, and environmental topics.

Avila studied civil engineering at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota (1983–1987) and received his degree in Fine arts from the same university (1988–1991). He has presented solo shows such as Talento Pirata, Jaime Ávila (Pirate talent, Jaime Ávila), at the Nueveochenta Gallery in Bogota (2013). His first shows in the United States were Life is a Catwalk at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University and 4th World – Five Cubic Meters at the Boston Arts Academy (2005). Ávila represented Colombia at the XXVI Sao Paolo Biennial in Brazil (2004), the III Liverpool Biennial in the United Kingdom (2004), the II Mercosul Biennial in Brazil, (2000) and the FIAC in Paris, France (1999).

He has participated in exhibitions such as ¡No más chicha!, at Alcuadrado Variable in Bogota (2009), the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, and the Casa de las Américas in Madrid, Spain (2004), Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography (1990–2005), at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, United States (2010), Resurfaced: Contemporary Colombian Art, at the Magnan Metz Gallery in New York, United States (2011), and Bogotá. City on the Edge, at the Center for Contemporary Art in Gdansk, Poland (2014)