Jhonatan Pulido Colombian, b. 1988

Jhonatan Pulido (b. 1988, Granada Meta, Colombia) is a Colombian painter based in London. He completed his BFA at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 2014 and received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2019. His work has been featured in The Art Newspaper, Elephant Magazine, and Artsy Editorial, and has been acquired by important collections including the Rubell Museum and El Espacio 23, Miami, FL, USA, amongst others. 

Jhonatan Pulido’s painting practice is centred on expressive mark making that draws on an explosive colour palette. He works through a continual application of material that produces bold fields of colour and form that interact and overlap to explore the vibrancy of painting today alongside the evocation of memory and reparation of trauma lodged in the past.

Drawing on his personal experiences and memories from growing up in rural Colombia, the artist creates artworks as an act of memory. His paintings reflect upon Colombian architecture, the traditions of rural communities, and the relations of these to socio-cultural conflict and the legacy of the civil war. Engaged in exploring pictorial decisions in contexts that come out of the conventions of art, Pulido seeks to reflect on the role this approach and its materiality performs in everyday contexts and historical grounds. His approach here is situated where value lies more in a negotiated functionality rather than advancing the idea of art for and in itself. His work places particular emphasis on components of popular Colombian architecture and the logic that it follows as inherited through history.