Translations:Oscar Muñoz/4/en

Although Muñoz was born in Popayán, he spent his early years in Venezuela. At the approximate age of eight, his family returned to Colombia and settled in the city of Cali. Before graduating high school, he began his training at the Departmental Institute of Fine Arts, where he completed initial training that was as yet not certified professionally. The influence of this center on the young people of Cali was complemented from some years previously by the founding of the La Tertulia Museum and its dissemination of modern art in the city. The atmosphere in the city during the 1970s was conducive to a creative boom in various fields. A variety of youth initiatives arose as an echo of the student movements that took place at the end of the previous decade, fostering a local counterculture founded on literature, theater, film and popular printmaking. It was a period that gave birth to projects such as the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies, the Cali Experimental Theater and Ciudad Solar, a cultural space that counted Andrés Caicedo, Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo among its members. The growth of graphic art and drawing in Cali would be pivotal in Munoz’s artistic career, taking the form of the holding of graphic art biennials. Also of great value would be the vision of the marginalization and bewilderment caused by the processes of urbanization that was revealed by the photography of Fernell Franco (1942-2006).