About

ABOUT

Omar Asprilla

 I make abstract paintings that investigate how intention, matter, time, and observation shape both the work and the person who makes it. 

I was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and immigrated to New York City when I was seventeen years old. Looking back, I realize that my education as a painter did not follow a conventional path. It was shaped as much by lived experience as by formal study, and by thousands of hours spent looking before I fully understood what I was seeing.

For years I worked inside four of New York's great museums—the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the International Center of Photography. Those years became an education unlike any classroom could provide. Every day I stood in the presence of works created across centuries and cultures. I returned repeatedly to the same paintings, sculptures, photographs, and objects, slowly discovering that looking is not a passive act. It is a discipline. Long before I had the language to describe my ideas, the museums taught me how sustained observation can transform the way we see.

Later, I studied Philosophy at Stony Brook University under Hugh J. Silverman. Philosophy did not teach me how to paint. Instead, it gave me words for questions that had already emerged through years in museums and decades in the studio. Painting has always remained the origin of my thinking. Philosophy became another way of reflecting on what painting had already revealed.

For more than forty years, the studio has been the center of my life. I begin every painting with intention—with decisions about scale, proportion, color, and surface. Yet once paint touches the canvas, another process begins. Gravity, time, moisture, pigment, and the physical behavior of materials all become active participants in the work. Rather than trying to eliminate these forces, I have learned to work with them. Every painting becomes an investigation rather than the execution of a predetermined image.

Over time, I came to understand that the purpose of painting is not to confirm what I already know. It is to discover what I could not have known before I began. That realization transformed my practice. Observation became as important as action. Patience became as important as intention. Looking became as important as making.

An important part of my work involves examining painted surfaces under magnification. These close observations reveal pigment migration, minute fractures, layered sediments, and subtle transformations that remain invisible to the naked eye. They remind me that paintings continue evolving long after they appear finished and reinforce my conviction that time itself is one of painting's essential materials.

As an Afro-Colombian American artist, my life has been shaped by migration, history, memory, and cultural inheritance. These experiences inevitably inform my work, but I do not seek to illustrate autobiography. Instead, I hope the paintings invite viewers to reflect on broader questions: How does uncertainty become form? What can matter teach us that ideas alone cannot? How does sustained attention change the way we understand the world?

People sometimes ask why I continue to paint after so many years.

The answer has never changed.

I continue because painting continues to surprise me.

Every canvas teaches me something I did not know before I began. As long as that remains true, I will continue returning to the studio.

I believe painting is more than a means of making images.

It is a disciplined way of thinking, observing, and discovering.

Welcome.

I hope you will spend time with the work.