Juan Araujo was born in 1971 in Caracas, Venezuela and since 1998 has been including appropriations of familiar elements of modern and postmodern culture and environment into his works. The Venezuelan artist started by creating paintings that studied the history of art by reproducing artists' work found in books, catalogues and online. Araujo has intensely investigated the history of Western culture, art history and modernism in his practice.
Due to this study and replication of the symbols of culture and modernism that surround us, his works provide a complex network of connections and references. They often point our attention towards well-known architects like Luis Barragán, Pancho Guedes, Burle Marx and
Lina Bo Bardi or artists like
Josef Albers, Mark Rothko and Jorge Molder.
After Araujo moved to Portugal from Venezuela his interest in the development of European modern and postmodern architecture deepened. He became fascinated with how these ideas arrived in Latin America to influence the development of 20th Century Latin American architecture.
His work is found in public collections including Tate, London, UK; Museum of Modern Art of New York, New York, USA; Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; Inhotim Center for Contemporary Art, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Art Now International Collection, San Francisco; Fundación Mercantil, Caracas; Cisneros Collection, Caracas and the Berezdivin Collection, San Juan.
