Chilean artist Benjamin Lira Valdés is an internationally exhibited sculptor, painter and printmaker. Born in Santiago, Chile in January 1950, he lived in the United States from 1977 until 1992 when he returns to Chile, settling in Santiago.

His artistic training began at the early age of 11 by attending classes with Dinora Doudchitzki at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Quinta Normal. His great interest and concern for painting and its techniques were later reflected in Ernesto Barreda’s workshop. Later he took private classes in human figure drawing with Carmen Silva, painting with Rodolfo Opazo and watercolor with Mario Toral, all well known artists of the chilean society.

In 1969 he studied architecture at Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. From 1970 to 1973 he traveled through Europe, residing in Spain where he entered the San Fernando Academy in Madrid to study Drawing and Painting. In addition, he attended courses at the Bayam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting in London, England.

While visiting Bolivia and Peru in 1975 he mainly photographed pre-Hispanic and colonial architectural centers. Between 1977 and 1979 he studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree. That same year, he took classes in human figure sculpture for three months at Claudio Bravo’s workshop and in 1980 he travelled to Morocco with his wife . In 2003 he became  Member of the Chilean Academy of Fine Arts of the Instituto Chile.

Benjamín Lira is a draftsman, painter and sculptor. His artistic training is marked by his experience and his studies in the United States, specifically at the Pratt Institute in New York, the city where he lived until 1992. In the field of national art, his work falls within the neo-figurative proposals of the last four decades. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. He is a full member of the Academy of Fine Arts of the Institute of Chile.

Benjamín Lira has always dedicated himself to painting, although his relationship with it has varied: in the beginning, he incorporated objects to the support, such as bottle caps, keys or spurs; then he abandoned object experimentation, and dedicated himself to treating pictorial matter only with pure pigments. In his most recent productions, he has brought together aspects of both expressive mediums, mixing sand, marble dust and oil,   to make his works.

His production varies between two stylistic aspects: geometric abstraction, perceptible in the paintings of large colored fields, and the new figuration, which highlights what is the characteristic hallmark of Lira: the representation of the human figure, preferably in profile, and plunged in an atmosphere that isolates her. He arrived at this theme through his studies of the masters of the Renaissance: recreating the classics, he immediately concentrated on capturing the essential solitude of man.

At first he made only heads, then the complete figure, which could later appear surrounded by a landscape, shaped in such a way that the figures seem to radiate intense and luminous colors from within. Along with the theme of loneliness, colour appears.  Highly saturated, and usually in primary tones, causing a strong and vibrant visual impact. Thanks to the rigor and diligence with which he approaches his production, Lira has generated works that respond to his coherent research.

The artist maintains himself in permanent reflexión about his own work, his creations manage to remain in the same stylistic line, but also evolve and improve, avoiding repetition. Keen on meditation, Lira spends enormous amount of time in it, as well as in composition. Time is conceived as rhythm and silence and acquires a formal degree through how the artist relates with his materials. Experts on his work signal that time is therefore transmitted to the receiver mainly by color. That time also opens a space where the narrative is displaced and silenced in favor of an underground communication that works through a pure image, an image that is both a metaphor for existence and salvation.

Despite the fact that Lira recently abandoned color- due among other things, to his interest in the monochrome of ceramics-  during 2001 color reappeared in its maximum expression, vibrant, intuitive and significant in itself. In large formats, the color is added one to another until obtaining interesting textures. The artist then removes some layers of this paint to adjust elements and finally obtains a fresh work that will refer to an increasingly complex pictorial space. This formal experimentations that Lira has carried out has prompted him to experiment with other pigments beyond oil, such as watercolors and acrylics, and to also verify the work of volume and shapes in ceramics.

His work has been part of many art expositions around the world, including Shanghai.

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