Armando Villegas

Name: ARTMAJEUR
Brand: ARTMAJEUR
Rating: 4.9 (12745 reviews)

Colombia •

Artist (Painting) •

1926 - 2013 •

Firma de Arte

Only the one who has the knowledge is capable of creating the illusion

Armando was born in the town of Pomabamba, Áncash, Peru. The last son of Pomabamba residents Alcibiades Villegas and Timotea López Diestra. He completed his primary and secondary school studies at the Colegio Nacional Guadalupe in Lima and in 1950 received a degree in drawing and painting from the National School of Fine Arts of Peru.

The Burial (1952). A typical passage from his homeland.

In December 1951, he arrived in Bogotá (Colombia) to enter the School of Fine Arts of the National University of Colombia as a scholarship holder in 1952, where he completed a postgraduate degree in mural painting with the muralist painter Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo and settled permanently in Colombia. About his arrival in this Latin American country, the poet Gonzalo Márquez Cristo writes: "Upon his arrival from Peru in 1951, in the provincial and cold Bogotá of that time, he chose to confront that terrible geometric god that governs artists, with a collection of works where texture was the protagonist and the profuse impasto displayed an expressive power never seen before in the naive territory - where the norm was to work with smooth and frigid surfaces - while he sought to establish a material eroticism."2

In 1953 he graduated from the National University of Colombia, with a Master's degree in Mural Painting. During his years of studies at the Fine Arts, he collaborated with the El Callejón Art Gallery in Bogotá, where he associated with the most outstanding members of society, the most select of the intellectuals, politicians, and young artists of the capital at that time.

His great contribution to this conduct is due to having been one of the first to explore the depth of Peruvian pre-Columbian designs, based on his Quechua culture of deep indigenous roots, which the artist adopts and captures as a constant of identity in his works, just as the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García did, who proclaimed the principles towards a new, distinctly American language with roots in pre-Hispanic cultures.

He is also recognized in Colombia as the only exponent of Fantastic Realism in the visual arts, a genre he cultivated for more than two decades, after having abandoned abstraction at the beginning of the 1970s. In 1973 he traveled to the Dominican Republic as an artisan promoter commissioned by the OAS, since in Colombia he had been a pioneer in artistic crafts. He became linked to Dominican cultural circles, and it was there, inspired by the direct contact of his Andean spirit with the Caribbean atmosphere, where he began to create those characters of his fantastic iconography, which have prevailed to this day, engraved as an imprint on the national and international collective unconscious.