Rafael Barrios

Rafael Barrios was born in 1947 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Venezuelan parents, and grew up between the United States and Venezuela. He studied drawing and painting at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, won the National Youth Painting award in 1963, and went on to the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, where he graduated with honours, and to the graduate programme in fine arts and monumental sculpture at New York University.

Barrios is known as the creator of Virtualism. His sculptures are flat, precisely cut planes of lacquered steel that read as solid, three-dimensional volumes: from each viewpoint, distance and light the form seems to change, to lift off the ground or to fall, as if gravity did not apply. “If gravity was not on our minds, the world would work better,” he says.

Over four decades he has taken part in more than a hundred solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, including his monumental sculptures on Park Avenue, New York (2012), Ontological Curiosity at the Coral Gables Museum (2019) and the Sculpture Garden of Pinta Miami (2025). His work is in the collections of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, the Museo de Esculturas al Aire Libre de Alcalá de Henares and corporate collections such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola.