color

Born in 1964, Keiko González studied first at the University of Texas and later at Rutgers University, where he was awarded the Fellowship for Excellence in the Visual Arts and attained his Master of Fine Arts. In 1992, he specialized in engraving at the Kunsthochschule in Dresden, Germany.

He has held fifteen individual exhibitions in Bolivia and the United States and has participated in more than twenty collective exhibitions on three continents. To name a few: Ru Artists, New York, Five young Bolivian artists in Rome; Circumstances, myth and abstraction in Bolivian contemporary art, IMF, Washington DC; Galerie Downingstrasse, Dresden, Entre trópicos, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber, Caracas. His work has also been represented at international biennales in Cairo and Cuenca.

Among many awards, he has received the First Prize in Painting at the Salón Pedro Domingo Murillo in La Paz, Grand Prize at Recuperación del Dibujo, BHN, La Paz, Grand Prize at the XI Bienal de Santa Cruz, Bolivia, Grand Prize at Salón Internacional de Arte (SIART), La Paz and the First Prize at Salón 14 de Septiembre, Cochabamba, Bolivia.

His paintings have neither geographic adherences, nor artistic allegiances. They radiate freedom reached by a steady search on empty supports. From the early 1990s, Keiko´s works have been a constant dialogue between figuration and abstraction, with the predominance of the latter. In 1991, he displayed paintings made up by colourful abstract planes, which combined formal rigor with informal space. The powerful expressions bring to mind De Kooning´s works of the 1950s. These pieces appear to be the result of a random process, where the artist almost attacked the support with his media, only to cease when the true spirit of the painting had been revealed.

In 1992 he showed paintings which had subdued to the figurative, evoking women painted by Braque during his post Cubist period and Matisse’s recumbent figures. However, Keiko introduced them to an imaginative deconstruction of the aesthetic trend.
Between 1993 and 1994 he created organic shapes reminiscent of leaves, branches and sexual organs, which explore the picture plane in compositions that elude both a symbolic interpretation and a relationship with natural forms.

In recent years, he has been consistent in his quest for freedom and has continued to create works within the context of abstract art. The paintings displayed here were created in the field of two-dimensionality and that of three-dimensional space. Painted in acrylic, they range from a chromatic saturation of yellows, through cold blues, sombre blacks and nihilistic whites. His artistic conception engages tonalities with geometrical shapes, and chromatic planes with lines. The paintings restricted within wooden frames can be arranged randomly to create complex compositions, and allowing freedom of expression.
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"Keiko González" by ARTE BOLIVIANO CONTEMPORANEO on Facebook