About

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  Omar Asprilla is a Colombian-born, self-taught abstract artist whose practice is grounded in philosophy and shaped by an enduring engagement with existential, phenomenological, and ethical questions. Working primarily with large-scale sprayed acrylic and mixed media, he investigates the unstable relationship between order and disorder, permanence and transformation, control and contingency. His paintings occupy a space where material process becomes a form of inquiry into the conditions of contemporary existence.

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, and raised in New York after immigrating to the United States as a teenager in the 1980s, Asprilla studied Continental Philosophy at Stony Brook University. His intellectual formation was deeply influenced by existential thought, phenomenology, and critiques of dualistic modes of thinking that separate subject from object, self from other, and humanity from nature. These concerns continue to serve as the conceptual foundation of his artistic practice.

Rather than illustrating philosophical ideas, Asprilla embeds them within the material structure of the work itself. Central to his paintings are the cracks, separations, and surface tensions that emerge through the interaction of gravity, time, and matter. These fractures are not treated as imperfections but as records of pressure, duration, and becoming. They function as metaphors for a world increasingly marked by ecological instability, social fragmentation, political violence, and the dehumanization of those perceived as different. The crack signals both rupture and possibility—a point at which established forms break down and new forms of understanding become conceivable.

Asprilla approaches painting as a disciplined negotiation between intention and material autonomy. Through layering, erasure, and recalibration, each work unfolds as an encounter between human agency and material becoming. Drawing upon phenomenological conceptions of perception, he rejects the traditional opposition between subject and object. The painting is not a passive surface awaiting inscription but an active field in which artist, material, and process continually shape one another. Authorship becomes distributed across gesture, gravity, duration, and matter itself.

The resulting surfaces operate less as images than as events. Order and disorder, symmetry and asymmetry, creation and destruction, permanence and erosion coexist without resolution. Rather than seeking to overcome these oppositions, the work inhabits the unstable space between them, revealing the limits of dualistic thinking and the interdependence of forces often understood as separate. Meaning emerges not through representation but through the lived encounter between perception, material presence, and time.

Outside conventional art-school structures, Asprilla's artistic education developed through prolonged observation. While working as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, he spent years immersed in the daily presence of modern and contemporary masterworks. The discipline of looking—often for hours at a time—became a form of informal apprenticeship, shaping his understanding of scale, restraint, material intelligence, and the expressive potential of abstraction. Following his relocation to Barcelona in 2000, he spent years refining an independent visual language that resisted stylistic allegiance and academic prescription.

Situated within the legacy of postwar abstraction, post-minimalism, and process-based painting, Asprilla's work treats abstraction not as an escape from reality but as a means of confronting it. His paintings invite reflection on how we inhabit a world increasingly defined by instability, interdependence, and uncertainty. They do not offer solutions. Instead, they make visible the tensions through which meaning, responsibility, and renewal become possible. 

Omar Asprilla lives and works in Dallas, Texas.