Veronica Matiz

Veronica holds a masters degree in visual arts with emphasis on plastic arts from Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. She got to sculpture through painting. It all started with the smell of turpentine when she played at her grand-mother’s house. She used to play and paint, paint and play. Both things were one and the same. As a teenager, the world was figurative. Veronica used to paint apples, pears. She made patterns using solid colors, and tried to copy Magritte’s brush strokes. Sometimes she ventured into more abstract artists like Kandinsky. Eventually, she  decided to go to Italy to study Fine Arts in Florence and then she took independent courses with artists in Rome. She discovered engraving, and that she could make it tridimensional by modifying it with pressed cardboard.

Upon her return to Colombia, Veronica enrolled in Visual Arts at Javeriana University, where she started to experiment with textures, to play the gesture, to use sand, acrylic spheres, clothing and other materials that would allow her to give volume to the canvas. During the third semester, she discovered the work of American artists Richard Serra and Frank Gehry. Thanks to them, and to Colombian sculptors Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar and Edgar Negret, a new path opened, one that she still travels through: that of sculpture. It was at university that she developed a profound vocation for the material that was reinforced with workshops at the School of Arts and Crafts in Bogotá. She started with wood and then used copper and bronze. She ended up with steel. She has learned to tame it; to turn it into a vehicle to express fragility.

She recently participated in one of the largest exhibitions of contemporary art in Europe: Nordart, in Büdelsford, Germany.