Álvaro Barrios is a multidisciplinary artist whose works are known for their sense of humour, their irony, and the influence of collage and comic strips. His themes are often paradoxical and full of cultural references, centrally influenced by Duchamp, surrealism, conceptual art and pop culture. 

Drawn to comic strips as a youth, Barrios began his career by incorporating these narratives into artistic compositions, along with certain characters and superheroes that had marked him in a particular way.

His compositions are relaxed and fresh, but hidden within is a profound knowledge of Art History reviewed with intelligent irony, as well as a study of modern collecting with sense of humour and sarcasm. 

His myths, references and characters overlap and mix in a natural way, creating an intriguing illusion. They encourage the spectator to come closer and discover how the artist’s revision is simple and without make up, in an honest and direct way. They allow his works to be empathetic, with very clear human references.

Barrios was born in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1945. In 1966 he moved to Italy, where he studied at the Universitá di Perugia and in la Fondazione Giorgio Cini di Venezia. He has held many important exhibitions throughout the world, and his work is in numerous private and public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana, Cuba; the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, Washington, D.C. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art acquired 76 pieces of his series “grabados populares” for its Latin American art collection. Barrios currently lives and works in Colombia.