Statement + Biography

Manuel Calderón’s work unfolds through a persistent investigation into space, geometry, and the experience of inhabiting. His practice—centered on drawing as a tool for thought—explores the ways in which bodies relate to the structures that contain them: domestic architectures, systems of control, graphic supports.

Through rigorous procedures—ranging from monumental charcoal to meticulous tracing on cut paper—Calderón articulates a constant tension between organicity and structure, between bodily movement and geometric constraint. Repetition, the grid, the module, and the loop operate as strategies to make visible the invisible conditions that shape our perception and behavior.

Far from offering definitive answers, his work suggests displacements: from geometry to thought, from trace to gesture, from habitable space to symbolic confinement. In this drift between technique and metaphor, between the intimate and the structural, drawing becomes a critical way of inhabiting the world.

 

Manuel Calderón (Bogotá, 1985) holds a degree in Fine Arts from the National University of Colombia and earned honors in the Master’s program in Research, Art, and Creation at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 2015, when Colombia was the guest country at the ARCO art fair, he was selected to present his project *Entre Cajas* at the booth of Galería El Museo (Bogotá).

In 2012, he received the EFG Bank and *ArtNexus* Acquisition Prize, one of the most prestigious recognitions in the Latin American art scene. A year earlier, in 2011, he was awarded an honorable mention at the 5th Salon of Two-Dimensional Art by the Gilberto Alzate Avendaño Foundation.

Since 2009, his work has been exhibited widely at international art fairs and exhibitions, represented by Galería El Museo (Bogotá) and Galería Fernando Pradilla (Madrid). He has taken part in major artistic events in cities such as London, Paris, Barcelona, São Paulo, Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and Miami.