Painter. Dallas, TX. Represented by Joel Cooner Gallery.

Omar Asprilla was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and immigrated to New York City at seventeen. His education as a painter did not follow a conventional path. For years he worked inside four of New York's museums — the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the International Center of Photography — spending whole days in the galleries, returning to the same paintings until he understood that looking is not passive but a discipline. Those years began his practice. He later studied philosophy at Stony Brook University under Hugh J. Silverman, which gave him language for questions the studio had already raised.

He has painted for more than forty years and made more than three hundred paintings. He builds his surfaces in layers of acrylic and mixed media and sets the tension that will fracture them, but he does not decide the fissure: the first cracks appear about fourteen hours later, and in forty years no two paintings have cracked alike.

His memoir,  Learning to See: A Memoir of Painting, Philosophy, and Attention, was published in 2026. He is represented by Joel Cooner Gallery, in Dallas, where he lives and works.

For more than forty years I have been investigating a single question — not how to make paintings, but how we learn to see.

I begin each painting with intention: decisions about scale, proportion, color, and surface. I build the surface in layers and set the tension that will fracture it. But I do not decide the fissure. Gravity, moisture, pigment, and time become active participants. The first cracks open about fourteen hours later, so I leave the studio at night and return to something I did not choose. Then I go on painting into what has opened, and a color buried under later layers comes back up through the crack. In forty years no two have cracked alike.

I have learned to work with these forces rather than eliminate them. Each painting becomes an investigation rather than the execution of a predetermined image. The purpose of painting is not to confirm what I already know but to discover what I could not have known before I started.

As an Afro-Colombian American artist, my life has been shaped by migration, history, memory, and inheritance. I do not paint to illustrate autobiography. I hope instead that the paintings ask how uncertainty becomes form.