Jorge Blanco

Jorge Blanco (born 1945 in Venezuela) is an international artist who has created a distinctive sculptural language over the course of his career. His trademark subject is an abstracted figure that is at once recognizable and joyful, and his art celebrates a positive lifestyle, creating soaring testaments to the optimism of everyday life. Working primarily in painted acrylic and metal, he builds bold, flat-form figures whose simplified silhouettes and vivid color convey movement, leisure and human connection.

Blanco emigrated to the United States in 1999 and is now an American citizen. Since then he has won many public art commissions in cities across his adopted country, and his largest body of work has been created and fabricated in the United States, following the best practices, processes and fabrication standards for both outdoor and smaller-scale work. Alongside his public art he continues to make collectible sculptures, and his work is equally at home in gallery settings and outdoor public spaces.

Throughout his career Blanco has designed purposefully. His work embraces scale, landscape, urbanism and technology, and with its striking colors and impressive scale it imbues the surrounding landscape, architecture and social context with a joyful aura. A close look at his subtle and distinctly personal visual lexicon reveals the influence of Alexander Calder, Paul Klee and Joan Miró, among others, yet there is nothing derivative about his emblematic geometric abstractions: each is a direct response and addition to its site.

He lives with his wife in Sarasota, on the west coast of Florida.