Cayetano Sanz de Santamaría is a multidisciplinary visual artist focussed on painting, drawing, and etching. Santamaría’s practice fuses personal and cultural mythology with the visual language of surrealism. His vivid, exquisite tableaus conjure the land and sea creatures, flora and fauna of his native Colombia amidst bustling marketplaces, turquoise waters and baroque architecture. These chimeric creatures waver between therianthropy and zoomorphy, figuratively bridging a gap between humankind and the natural world, alluding to the primitive condition latent and encoded in human genes and our subconscious. Metaphor and humorous expression serves as a potent narrative conduit for Santamaría’s evocation of the real and imagined magic present in his homeland: a beautiful but complicated landscape shaped by its troubled past. Striving to honour the beliefs, mythologies and folklore of his forebears, Santamaría’s dexterous style of figuration and use of traditional printmaking techniques imbues these often overlooked histories with a palpable sense of realism. His large-scale canvases, often realised in large-scale and rich colour, immerse voyeurs in the exuberance of Barranquilla Carnival, abound with the traditional masks, music and movement forged by centuries of tradition and communal celebration. Santamaría aspires to be a voice for Colombia, using his practice as a reflective tool to navigate both his inner world and an external one abundant with 
biological, ethnographic and cultural diversity.

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BIO

Cayetano Sanz de Santamaría (b. Columbia) graduated from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York in 2021. He is currently based in London where he is currently completing his MA at the Royal College of Art. He held his first solo exhibition in Galeria La Localidad, and has featured in London group exhibitions with galleries including BWG Gallery, Arusha Gallery, The Bermondsey Project Space and The Gallery at Green and Stone, amongst others. Career highlights include the silent auction of the Association of Friends of the National Museum of Bogotá with the most bidded artwork The Lord of Light (2022), a prize of the Colombian news channel Caracol TV to produce exclusive prints, the elaboration of drawings for the production of Corona/Homecenter crockery, winner of the Tagsmart award at The Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair (UK).