Luis Caballero

Biography

In 1995 Luis Caballero came to Bogotá for an exhibition of drawings at the Luis Ángel Arango Library. It was his first return after many years in Paris. A few weeks later he died.

He was born on 27 August 1943 in Bogotá and grew up in a conservative Catholic family. His father, Eduardo Caballero Calderón, was a journalist and writer; his mother, Isabel Holguín Dávila, came from a family that had given Colombia several presidents. Older relatives on both sides worked in journalism, politics and literature, so a career as an artist was an unusual choice for a son in that circle. In 1961 he entered the fine arts programme at the University of Los Andes. There his teachers included the etcher Juan Antonio Roda and the critic Marta Traba; he later acknowledged the influence of both. In 1963 Caballero left for France and enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where, according to some accounts, he completed the course in 1964. In those years he discovered Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon, and later named them among those who had influenced him. In 1968, back in Colombia, he won first prize at the First Ibero-American Biennial in Medellín. In the same year, or in 1969 according to other accounts, he settled in Paris for good: there, in his words, he found more freedom. From 1970, as scholars note, an interest in the history of art becomes visible in his work; in 1973, at an exhibition in Bogotá, this showed itself in clear references to the Renaissance.

Caballero’s main subject was the human body, above all the male body, with a strong erotic charge and with motifs of violence. He always worked figuratively. At first his figures were schematic, outlined with a thick line; later came large sheets and canvases in mixed media: oil, ink, watercolour washes, sometimes fabric or rope, with colour held to muted sepia tones. He showed bodies alone or in pairs, entwined or facing one another. His solitary bodies are inert and express suffering rather than pleasure. To my mind, what is most noticeable in these works is their moral colouring: bodies punished, beaten, set against one another, yet drawn with a classical training behind them.

He was exhibited in France and beyond. In 1980 the Galerie Jade in Colmar held the exhibition “Caballero ou l’Irrésistible corps de l’Homme-Dieu” (“Caballero, or the Irresistible Body of the God-Man”); in 1990 there was a show at the Centre d’art contemporain of the Lycée du Forez in Feurs; in 1991 “Large Scale Drawings” was shown in New York at the Grey Art Gallery and the Nohra Haime Gallery; and in 1992 “Les grands dessins ou la représentation du corps” (“Large Drawings, or the Representation of the Body”) was shown in Saint-Quentin. Several of his prints are held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Caballero died in Bogotá on 19 June 1995, at the age of fifty-one. In 2023 Tate in London acquired a work by him, and in 2024 his first exhibition in the United Kingdom opened in London at Cecilia Brunson Projects.