Luis Fernando Ramírez Celis is a Fullbright scholar with a Master of Arts from Stony Brook University and an architecture degree from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. His comprehensive exhibition history includes the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Kunsthausbasseland Basel, The Tuhi in Auckland in New Zealand, Video Brazil in Sao Paulo, FUSO Museum of Natural History in Lisbon, National Endowment for the Arts in Buenos Aires, Cue Art Foundation and Pratt art gallery in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá, among others. He has received distinctions and awards such as Escape Tunnel First Prize, Ministry of Culture, Workshop School of Cartagena de Indias; Mention IX Luis Caballero Award 2016 – 2017, MAMBO; Artist residency grant, Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada, in 2013; the Joan Mitchell Award, MFA Grant Program, USA, in 2011; Biennial of Arts Award, Gilberto Alzate Avendaño Foundation, Bogotá, Colombia, in 2010; in 2009 – 2011; Nominated for the V Luis Caballero Award 2008 – 2009, among others. He is currently a curator at the Banco de la República Arts Unit and a professor at the Museology Master's Program at the National University of Colombia. He works from his Lucio Celis Studio space in Bogotá.
For over 20 years, Ramírez Celis has continuously developed an artistic career with a body of work focused on modernist architecture, design, and art of the first half of the 20th century and its subsequent influences and repercussions. In his projects, there are lines of work that have had presence and continuity throughout his career: the death of modern architecture and super housing blocks, the relationship between utopias in urban planning and the apiarian constructions of bees, contemporary music concerning space, the myth of the great modernist masters in architecture, composition, and organic forms. For over a decade, his production has been conducted through one of his most outstanding creations: the conception of an alter ego named Lucio Celis. Celis is an architect and modernist artist born in the 1930s in Bogotá and currently residing in Rio de Janeiro, the one from whom his studio takes its name. Lucio Celis is the author of many of his series and pieces. His most recent production is an extensive series of collages and models developed in the 1960s and 1970s. In these works, assembled clippings from architecture magazines are later spray painted and occasionally further complemented with three-dimensional compositions. Lucio Celis allows the artist to critically approach different periods in art history as a creator, not devoid of humor.
In his latest projects, he has explored the relationship between urban utopias and the life of bees, the connection in the architectural display devices behind the artwork, and the taming of the landscape in the modern garden through organic geometric shapes.
