Armando Villegas

Armando Villegas attended elementary and secondary school at Colegio Nacional Guadalupe in Lima, Peru, and graduated as a drawing and painting teacher from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in the same city in 1950. A year later, in 1951, he was admitted to the Escuela de Bellas Artes of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, in Bogotá, where he studied mural painting.

Since then, his activity both as an artist and as a teacher was incessant, with Villegas gaining widespread recognition as a tireless worker and researcher in a variety of expressions. Considered a pioneer in abstract art, Villegas explored the depth of Peru's pre-Columbian design, sustained in his own deeply-rooted Quechua culture, which he adopted and expressed as a mark of identity in his work.

After leaving abstraction behind in the early 1970s, Villegas became a practitioner of Magical Realism in the visual arts, a style he continued to explore for over two decades. In 1973 he traveled to the Dominican Republic as a handcraft promoter for the O.A.S., since Colombia had pioneered the development of artistic handcrafts. Villegas established contacts with the cultural milieu in the Dominican Republic, and it was there, inspired by the encounter of his Andean spirit with the Caribbean environment, that he began to forge the characters that populate his fantastic iconography, present to this day as an indelible mark on the national and international collective unconscious.

In 1977 Villegas traveled to Mexico, where he exchanged ideas with Rufino Tamayo and explored other fields such as collage, constructions in a variety of materials, recycling, assemblages, soft sculptures, and bronze.

Of particular importance in Villegas' long career are, among others, his exhibitions at the Basel International Fair (in 1984); Seoul (South Korea), invited by Dankook University for the first solo exhibition by a South American practitioner of Magical Realism in the visual arts; Tokyo; and New York.

In 1986 Villegas traveled to Santa Marta, Colombia, due to close family ties. There, moved by the magnificence of the landscape in San Pedro Alejandrino, he visualized the possibility of creating an homage to Simón Bolívar, the Liberator, precisely on the location of his death. In this way he became the promoter, founder, and first director of a museum featuring the most representative and select names of the arts in the Bolivarian nations. Today, it is known as the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Bolivariano de Santa Marta, Colombia.

In 1993 Villegas was personally given Colombian citizenship by Cesar Gaviria, the president of the country. A few days later, he traveled to Cali to present his last solo exhibition.

Starting in 2002, Villegas decided to open a new front in his work, and returned, without abandoning his figurative explorations, to the abstraction of his early career. He continued to work with his pre-Columbian roots, using to that effect a variety of materials and techniques adapted to the times and arguing from more than half a century of study, experience, and uninterrupted exploration.

Armando Villegas received important distinctions for his contributions to Latin American culture, and his works are part of several private collections as well as local and international museums. During the past decade he devoted his efforts to creating 1,000 sculptures using discarded materials. In 2012 he was in charge of creating the Google doodle in honor of Colombia's independence, and in 2013 he was a finalist for the Príncipe de Asturias Award.

His death at the age of 87 saddens the Latin American art world, but his legacy remains.