(Maturín, Edo Monagas, Venezuela, 1975)

Jonidel Mendoza is emerging as one of the promising new talents in Venezuelan art. His work transitions mainly between drawing and sculpture. Mendoza uses a variety of materials including industrial fiberglass nettings, aluminum micro-perforated stripes, metallic mesh, platen and wire for his human lightweight shadow figures. He is interested mostly in the physical and philosophical qualities of the immaterial, which he communicates through transparency and levity. The human shape appears as a suggestion, as an emerging presence, as a “failed specularity” in his own words.

Jonidel Mendoza is one of the youngest artists in our gallery. He studied Fine Arts in the Eloy Palacios School in hometown Maturín, Edo. Monagas, and moved to Caracas in 1998 to pursue studies at the Instituto Universitario de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón. In the same year, he began showcasing his work individually and in collective exhibitions in galleries, museums and art fairs in Caracas, Bogotá and Miami. In 2004 he won the Best Novel Artist prize at a Painting Contest in Maracaibo, Venezuela. In 2006 he moved to Seoul, South Corea for a year, where he had a solo show at the Seoul International Art Fair. His work is represented at the Museo de Arte de Maracay Mario Abreu, the Universidad José María Vargas and the Banco Industrial de Venezuela foundation among others. Lives and works in Caracas.