Federico Uribe

250 NE 60th Street
Miami, FL US
33137

Profile Type: artist

• Experiential and Interactive
• Other
• Sculpture
• Wall Art

Federico Uribe’s work has become prominent internationally over the past decade, particularly in the United States, and has been collected by multiple museums, and featured in several museum exhibitions across the country. Born in Bogota, Colombia, Uribe lives and works in Miami. His artwork resists classification. Rooted in the craft of sculpture and paint, it rises from intertwining everyday objects in all possible and surprising ways, but still with a formal reference to the history and tradition of classical art. Uribe makes art that surprises and engages. He creates exquisitely made objects that are assemblages of items such as bullet shells, cut up pieces of color pencils, colored shoelaces and pins, electrical wires, ties, plastic waste, just to name a few. The sculptures he creates are not sculpted but constructed and weaved, in curious and unpredictable, repetitive and almost compulsive ways. The result is absolutely whimsical yet contains enormous efficacy and communicability. By connecting objects in such fresh ways, Uribe reflects on Nature's pivotal presence and in the process, he goes full circle and gives back to Nature what was taken from her: as trees are turned into books, Federico turns books into trees, leather shoes into animals, while the use of bullets and cartridges to bring a fox or a rabbit back to life might illustrate dramatically the brutal annihilation of wildlife all around our planet. Uribe’s use of bullet shells plays with the juxtaposition between playful or noble subject matter and an emblematically dangerous medium. The pieces depict animals or plants that are full of life and reflect an innocence that the artist sees in nature. The media may appropriately inspire political or philosophical debate; however, the artist’s only intention is to encourage the viewer to see objects, which typically have a natural function, in a stark and optimistic way. “As a recurrent intention in my work, I encourage the viewer to discover, beyond the sole function of an object, an underlying symbolic and aesthetic reality where life overcomes death and beauty supplants destruction”. Humor, beauty and love are essentially what remain the memory of the viewer.