Alvaro Barrios

Born on October 27 in Barranquilla, Colombia. From a young age he showed great interest in drawing, making his first drawing at the age of 4: the logo of a local newspaper, before learning to read or write.
Comic strips were always present in his childhood, his mother bound them and collected them for him.

He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Barranquilla and architecture at the University of the Atlantic. Later he took courses in Art History in Perugia and at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice. He has worked as an art professor at several universities.
In 1965 he held his first individual exhibition at the Casa de Don Benito Gallery, in the old center of Cartagena after an exhibition by the artist Edgar Negret, who was one of the first artists to be interested in the work of a young Álvaro Barrios. The following year he exhibited "Drawings, collages and comics" at the gallery of the School of Fine Arts.

He has participated in the following international exhibitions: VII Paris Biennial (1971); IX Tokyo Biennial (1974); XIII Sao Paulo Biennial (1975). He received the Gold Medal of the IX Tokyo Biennial (1974); the Prize of the first Latin American Triennial of Engraving, Buenos Aires (1979), and the Luis Caballero Prize, Santafé Gallery, Bogotá (1998).
In 2001 he won the Latin American Prize for Painting and Mixed Media of the first Buenos Aires Biennial, Argentina with his series “The Fifty Paths of Life.”