BIO

Born in a small town of Colombia, Efren Isaza's interest in art started early in his life at the age of six when his relation with painting and drawing emerged inherited from his paternal grandmother and from his elder brother and sister. In the late '80s he moved to the city of Medellin and shortly afterwards started his textile and fashion design career, quickly getting involved with well-known magazines, designers and models. His interest in visual arts was kindled and soon grew into a passion for photography, fashion, and film. Following this He started to take private lessons of photography and began to approach fashion photography, shoting a number of high-profile fashion editorials, actors, actresses, clients and fashion campaigns; later on he graduated with a fine art degree.

Since 2003, right after he based in Bogotá, Colombia's capital, Efren entered into the digital world experimenting with his unpublished photographs and decided to mix them with all the disciplines he loved and practiced from early age (so as not to discard one or the other) getting - a palimpsest - as a result: a set of multiples layers with manual strokes, illegible hand written texts, scraped drawings on the photographs, brushstrokes, and fingerprints-a claustrophobic excess of details and forms and a surrealistic set of symbols- It was until 2007 when he began to publicly show the results of all that experimentation.

As an artist Efren works in between photography, painting, drawing and collage, blurring the boundaries between them, creating a world where the analogue and digital coexist in a constant tension. The human body is always present in his artworks, transformed and constructed as a result of mankind´s conflict with their own bodies so he presents the surpass of the natural body in favor of the concept of a built and manipulated beauty. Sometimes those bodies appear transgressed in an explicit and crude manner or as an illusion of perfect or extreme beauty; sometimes they appear as satires to his own or collective imaginary beauty and sometimes as an attempt to exhaust the production of images that have already been produced. Even in his fashion editorials He transgresses photography as an objective medium, distorting body’s anatomy and breaking the mimesis of the image. In spite of the anatomical deformation, the body vulnerability, the instability of a sought beauty, the deconstruction and construction of a new body, the resulting image appears as a perfect illusion simulacrum.

His first exhibition was in Art Basel 2009 at photography collector Gert Elfering house, immediately followed by a solo exhibition in Casa Tua, a prestigious club in Miami, USA.

In 2016 and 2017 Christie’s and Sotheby's the auction houses in New York auctioned some of his artworks - next to the work of masters Peter Beard, Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Avedon -. Afterwards Isaza’s work has been exhibited in different cities such as München, New York, Aspen, Paris, Berlin, among others.