Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo

IGNACIO GÓMEZ JARAMILLO (Medellín, Colombia, 1910- Coveñas, Colombia, 1970).
"Portrait of a girl.
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 62 x 48 cm.
Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo was a Colombian painter, draftsman and muralist, considered one of the most outstanding figures of Colombian art in the 20th century. He was a member of the Colombian Muralist Movement along with Santiago Martínez Delgado and Pedro Nel Gómez. He won first prize in painting at the Colombian Artists' Salons of 1940 and 1961.
He was known as "antitrabista" for his defense of Colombian art after the modernism promoted by Marta Traba. He taught at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Bogota. Part of his work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Colombia, and his mural La liberación de los esclavos is exhibited in the Sala de Patrimonio Artístico of the Palacio de la Cultura Rafael Uribe Uribe.
Born into the family of Sigfredo Gómez Jiménez and Encarnación Jaramillo, he studied at the Escuela de Arte Antonio J. Duque in Medellín and took several semesters of engineering. In 1928 he worked as a draftsman in Pepe Mexía's workshop. He traveled to Spain in 1929 with the intention of studying architecture, although he soon resumed his artistic training at the Círculo Artístico in Barcelona. In 1930 he made a series of landscapes of Toledo and in 1931 he held his first individual exhibition in Madrid. In 1932 he moved to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He returned to Colombia in 1934, year in which he had two individual exhibitions. In 1936 he obtained a government scholarship to study mural painting in Mexico. Upon his return, in 1938, he painted two murals for the National Capitol in Bogota; these works were considered inappropriate at the time and covered with lime, until they were rediscovered and restored by students of the National University in 1959.
In 1949, during the direction of León de Greiff in the area of Cultural Promotion and Fine Arts, he participated in the founding of the Colombo-Soviet Institute of Culture along with a group of intellectuals and artists that included Alfonso López Michelsen and Baldomero Sanín Cano, with the purpose of strengthening cultural ties with the Soviet Union.
Gómez Jaramillo is recognized as one of the three great artists who transformed the practice of muralism in Colombia. He was professor and director of the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Bogotá and served as president of the Asociación de Escritores y Artistas de Colombia (Association of Writers and Artists of Colombia). In addition, as a columnist for El Tiempo, he held a series of debates on Colombian art with Marta Traba, which consolidated his nickname of "anti-trabista".