Édgar Francisco Jiménez

After finishing his studies in Beijing, he travelled to Hong Kong where he taught Expression with Chinese ink in the Art Centre, and was the art teacher at the Lycée Français International Victor Segalen. In 1989 he began to explore acrylic on canvas, conserving dance as the main subject of his artistic creativity. Five years later, having participated in several seminars on spiritual development, he began to meditate while he painted, creating therefore a series of abstract paintings, which became his new form of expression. During his twelve years in Asia, he had individual exhibitions in Hong Kong, South Korea, Thailand, China, Japan and Macau. In search of new horizons in 1995, he went to Canada where he developed a series of erotic paintings inspired by the erotic mysticism of the Tantra, which were exhibited in 1996 in the Foundation of Contemporary Art Gallery in Miami and the Here and Now Gallery in Toronto. Since then he has had solo exhibitions in Colombia, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and participated in group exhibitions in Brazil, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Taiwan, the United States, Germany, Egypt and Canada, where he participated in the travelling exhibition Hands for a positive change, in the National Exhibition Centre of Esteban, the Library of Weyburn and Galerie des Arts Contemporains of Montreal, organized by the Canadian Heritage and the Colombian Embassy in Ottawa.

In September 1983 he obtained a scholarship from the Colombo-Chinese Cultural Exchange to do a postgraduate degree in traditional Chinese painting at China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, until 1986. There, with the technique and the philosophy of Chinese painting and calligraphy, he created a very particular style, combining the outlines of Chinese calligraphy with the movements of Colombian dances, giving his work a unique expression – a combination of Western and Eastern feelings.

In 1980 he went to Paris and there, at Atelier 17 with Stanley William Hayter, he studied colour etching. This let him develop the subject of cumbia, a rhythmic Colombian dance, but it was the powerful reference to his cultural identity that allowed him to show his own personal feelings of living abroad for the first time. In Spain he studied Lithography at the School of Arts and Crafts of Barcelona, where in 1982 he had his own individual exhibitions at the Cercle Artistic de Sant Lluc Gallery and the Sarro Gallery.

He studied fine art at the National University of Colombia, in Bogotá, and graduated in 1977 and began to paint subjects of the Colombian Atlantic Coast, in oil and charcoal. In 1979 he won second prize at the first judged Regional Art Competition of Magdalena Province in Santa Marta, Colombia. After reading the novel "The Autumn of the Patriarch" by García Márquez, he was inspired to do a series of paintings that reflected the Magical Realism presented in the novel. This work was exhibited in 1980 in the Ocher Gallery, in Caracas, Venezuela.

Édgar Francisco Jiménez (Pijiño, 1951) is a Colombian artist.