Darío Ortiz Robledo (Ibagué, Colombia, 1968) is a Colombian painter and writer based in Mexico City, widely regarded as one of Latin America’s foremost exponents of neo-realist figurative painting. His work enters into dialogue with the Western pictorial tradition to reinterpret classical, biblical, and mythological subjects from a contemporary perspective. 

“I am primarily interested in the human being, in the body and the psyche,” he has stated. A self-taught painter with a presence spanning more than twenty countries, Darío Ortiz is among the Colombian artists with the most extensive record in international museum collections. Duque Arango Galería exhibits and represents his work in Colombia and at international art fairs.

Born in Ibagué, the capital of Colombia’s Tolima department, Darío Ortiz Robledo graduated from the Colegio San Tarsicio in Bogotá in 1986 and developed entirely as a self-taught painter. He began exhibiting collectively at the age of fifteen, in 1984, and held his first solo show at eighteen. This path outside academic institutions did not prevent him from building a rigorous and deeply informed pictorial discourse grounded in European and Latin American art history. Since 1987 he has published short texts on art, developing a critical voice that runs parallel to his painting practice. In 2003 he founded the Museo de Arte del Tolima in his hometown, an institution he has presided over ever since and which has become a key reference center for the visual arts in the Colombian Andean region.

Darío Ortiz’s neo-realism is, in his own words, “the defense and construction of an alternative discourse” against the conceptual hegemony imposed on Western art after the Second World War. His large-format compositions reinterpret biblical and mythological scenes through the lens of the present. The beauty of the human body, violence, memory, and identity also run as constant themes through a body of work that reclaims figurative painting as a fully alive and relevant language.

Darío Ortiz’s international career encompasses more than one hundred collective exhibitions across over twenty countries and some thirty solo shows in Italy, France, Austria, Slovakia, China, South Korea, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Among the most significant are Darío Ortiz pittore e disegnatore at the Museo Civico di Abano Terme (Padova, Italy, 2001); Crónicas de guerra at the Kulturzentrum El Arcángel in Vienna (2002); El tiempo una entelequia at the Presidential Palace of Bratislava, Slovakia (2003); and Los versos apócrifos de Dante at the Museo Maguncia in Buenos Aires. His participation in the 7th International Beijing Art Biennale (2017) led curator Vicenzo Sanfo to invite him to represent the San Marino Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) with six large-format paintings under the title Interesting Times—a milestone that confirmed his place in the global figurative painting landscape.