Juan Araujo
b. 1971, Venezuela
Venezuelan painter, born 1971.
Over the last twenty years, Venezuelan artist Juan Araujo has pursued a highly personal investigation of the history of Western culture, art history and modernism by making hyper-realistic paintings based on images found in printed materials or online.
Juan Araujo was born in 1971 in Caracas, Venezuela. He lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.
Each exhibition of Araujo’s work is a dense forest of connections and references, a palimpsest of narratives directing our attention to the work of architects such as Luis Barragán, Pancho Guedes, Burle Marx and Lina Bo Bardi or artists including Josef Albers, Mark Rothko and Jorge Molder.
Since moving to Portugal from Venezuela, Araujo has become fascinated with the genesis of modern and postmodern architecture in Europe and how these ideals later travelled across the Atlantic to influence the development of twentieth century Latin American architecture. Examples include Oscar Niemeyer’s ‘Casa das Canoas’ (1953) in Rio de Janeiro; Lina Bo Bardis’ ‘Casa de Vidro’ (1951) in Sao Paulo and the Luis Barragán house (1948) in Mexico City.
[Biography courtesy of Stephen Friedman Gallery]