Enrique Grau Araújo was a painter, sculptor, set designer, printmaker, film director, and educator who significantly influenced Colombian modernism. Hombre Dormido (1945) depicts the monumental figure of a man curled up asleep on a white blanket. The work reveals an affiliation with the aesthetics of Mexican Muralism and the artist’s interest in representing the Indigenous and Afro-Colombian population in an Americanist programme. Over the following decades, Grau Araújo explored abstraction and Surrealism. With Gabriel García Márquez and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, he co- directed the pioneer Latin American surrealist film The Blue Lobster (1954). In 1955, after visiting Mexico to study Muralism in person, he travelled to Florence, where he was greatly influenced by Piero della Francesca’s use of geometry on the human body. Grau Araújo’s later work matured with his figurative painting during the 1970s, when he revisited Expressionist human figures, creating symbolic theatrical scenes that included elements of humour and fantasy.
—Laura Hakel
