Santiago Parra

Santiago Parra (b.1986 in Bogotá, Colombia) is known for his works created by singular brushstrokes. Parra has been exhibited in exhibitions across the UK and internationally in cultural hubs such as New York, St. Moritz, Mexico City, Vienna, Madrid, and Miami. Parra’s work has also entered private and institutional prominent collections, including the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the Koç Art Collection in Turkey, and the Jean et Colette Cherqui Collection in France. 

After studying Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, he pursued an education in Fine Art at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and later at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, where he also studied Motion Pictures and Television.

Parra believes that he has achieved a true, automatic painting technique, one which extends the subconscious and unimpeded free activity championed by the 20th-century Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists. The artists literary background is undoubtedly felt in his calligraphic style where abstract forms are suspended above a flat, raw canvas. The effect is one of dynamism and drama. 

Parra arrests his stroke as soon as he feels acutely conscious of his control over the brush. Left still are the rustic, expressive forms that remain unadjusted and unaltered. Turning away from typical formal constraints congruent with visual culture, such as compositional order, Parra embraces an abstraction that is instead charged with a sense of his spontaneous, creative force.