Eduardo Ramirez Villamizar

 

His parents were Jesús Ramírez Castro, a native of Villa del Rosario and Adela Villamizar Cote, from Pamplona. He was the youngest of 11 brothers. His father was a jeweler and when he went bankrupt, it is necessary that they move to Cúcuta, capital of the department of Norte de Santander. He travels to Bogotá to study architecture at the National University of Colombia, although his interest revolves around painting. After leaving the architectural career, he began to paint in Expressionist terms.

"I reacted against the violence of Expressionism by showing its opposite. And the opposite of violence is to build, it is order, it is civilization ". Eduardo Ramírez

In Paris, he made his personal work, characterized by the close relationship of flat shapes presided over by straight lines or curves, design and color that mesh together. Ramírez's abstract painting was the necessary preamble to his work as a sculptor. The unity of all its production is such that some paintings clearly anticipate its first reliefs and even announce the forms and spaces of its free sculptures.

Between 1959 and 1964, Ramírez Villamizar made numerous reliefs. The reliefs of 1962 were dedicated by the artist to the pre-Columbian goldsmiths, where he learned a lot from the design, the organization of the surfaces and the contrasts between smooth planes and other very elaborate prehispanic works. In 1963, he worked free sculpture Homage to the poet Jorge Gaitán Durán. Between 1964 and 1966 Ramírez made other exempt sculptures to the poet Eduardo Cote. In 1971 Columnata worked in Fort Tryon Park in New York, and the 16 towers in the eastern hills of Bogotá, at the height of the National Park.

In Colombia, the Argentine critic Marta Traba, among the art critics in force, was the one who best defined the parameters by which Ramírez Villamizar's work, of extreme coherence and clarity of meanings, can still be analyzed today. He settled in Suba, in a house with a large garden. There he collects, along with some pre-Columbian and modern works, hundreds of snails. That close contact with nature was manifested in many ways in his works of the late seventies. At the beginning of the eighties Ramírez returned to work sculptures of straight lines and made some pieces of low height, practically spread across the floor. The architecture returned to preside over many of the works of the eighties.

In recent years, he knows the main archaeological sites of Latin America. The trip to Machu Picchu, at the end of 1983, was definitive for the production begun at the beginning of the following year, of great constructions full of sobriety and power. It is characterized by the presence of large articulated planes, reminiscent of the polygonal blocks of Inca architecture.

The constructions of Ramírez Villamizar are linked to the sculptures of two-dimensional components that have been carried out since the beginning of the century.

Finally, between 1989 and 1990 the artist also advanced some wooden constructions, among which stands out the model of the temple of laws, a tribute to General Francisco de Paula Santander.

 

Source: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Ram%C3%ADrez_Villamizar#Biograf%C3%ADa