- 150 years of birth

- Tribute to the mothers of the world

- Humberto Chaves and the world of the woman: the history of happy encounter

- Mater Dei

- Dossier El Libertador: history of a painting

- Transportation Series

- Contact

1 August 1891 - 28 August 1971: 150 years of birth

“The child's foot does not yet know that it is a foot

and wants to be a butterfly or an apple.

But then the glass and the stones, the streets,

the stairs, and the roads of the hard earth/they teach the foot that it cannot fly,

that it cannot be round fruit on a branch.

The child's foot was then defeated, /he fell in battle, he was a prisoner, condemned to live in a shoe ”.

Perhaps it was a bright day like today, when 130 years ago, you saw the light for the first time, and that first was the light of Medellín, the small country that you inhabited, recognized and painted, the same one that a father gave you who did not fit into the churches or luxurious houses, and that he was only there to paint and decorate them, filling your childhood with colors, brushes and charcoals, and the same city where your mother died so soon, filling your soul with incredible nostalgia; the same city where you knew as a child the horrors of war and the arbitrariness of destiny, but also, the city where you found Maria, your home and your daily life so full of challenges.

We know that a serious transmutation occurred in your soul, and that perhaps your once bare feet were defeated by the harshness of the pavement, but your love for the light, the color, and the beauty you never grew up before could never defeat because as the child ready to play when the least occasion allows it, you were always there, ready with your eyes and your hands as a child painter soon to recognize the ethereal and fleeting moment when the soap bubble returns to be a drop, showing us how the light plays about everything we are and about what surrounds us.

That day in August was promising and no one imagined that today, 130 years later, we would return to your name and appreciate that strange mixture of tragedy and color with which you went through your existence, filling us with testimonies of the beauty that surrounds us because that is your works, a sing of respect for the other, an exploration without limits and without pause on this small homeland that your descendants still inhabit today.