Bogotá, 1927.
Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Celis is an architect, landscape designer, plastic artist, and musician born in Bogotá in 1927 who studied architecture at the National University of Colombia. During his prolific professional career, Celis developed an extensive artistic and architectural practice between Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. He currently spends his creative time in the middle of a garden designed between his studio and that of his lifelong friend, the Brazilian and world-renowned landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. Among his most notable projects is CN70, a sound installation that he developed in collaboration with the Colombian composer Jacqueline Nova and that remained unpublished until 2017 when the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá installed it for the first time, the method of sleeping to achieve better productive and creative performance, which, by the way, became internationally known in the 1950s, and finally, his preeminent and extensive series of collages that began in the 1950s and continued until the 1970s, this being series a critical work where he warned us about the harmful use of asbestos in architecture, also as a sublime constructivist manifestation based on the modernist principles of Jean Arp. Celis is also known for having created numerous architectural and landscape projects in Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, and Bogotá, most of them destroyed for the sake of unconscious urbanism, of which only a few remain standing.
