Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar: Google Doodle Denotes Colombian Artist’s 97th Birthday

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the life and work of the regarded Colombian artist Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar’s 97th Birthday, broadly considered one of the most remarkable sculptors of his nation.

Who is Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar?

Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar constructive artist nortesantandereano. One of the first in Colombia, one of the most significant in Latin America. He shows with Edgar Negret, Grau, Wiedemann, Botero, and Obregón. In 1970, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar changed pre-Columbian art into geometric works of abstract and minimalist art.

Born in Pamplona on this day in 1922, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar was the son of a jeweler who studied architecture before accomplishing worldwide approval for his paintings and sculptures.

Presented to international modernism on outings to Paris and New York during the 1950s, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar met with early achievement. One of his pieces, The Black and White Painting, was obtained by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1956, and after two years he won a Guggenheim award.

After returning home, he became a pioneer of abstract art in Colombia. His 1952 solo exhibition at the National Library of Bogotá was one of the first shows of abstract painting, and his 1957 Composition in Ocres was the nation’s first non-objective wall painting. The curved shapes of his huge El Dorado help made for Banco de Bogotá were canvassed in gold leaf, a gesture to pre-Columbian figures and Latin American goldsmithing. In later sculptural works, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar interpreted the particular shapes of pre-Columbian art into abstract planes.

Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar represented Colombia at the 1969 São Paulo Biennial, winning the second international prize. He made the fantastic 1974 piece Sixteen Towers on the Bogotá hills, and the Colombian government awarded him the prestigious Cruz de Boyacá. His legacy lives on at the Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar Museum of Modern Art in his hometown, where a great part of the artist’s work is housed in a grand colonial home in Pamplona’s central square.