BIOGRAPHY: Julio Parra

In Biography, Julio Parra examines identity as a mutable and unstable construct, shaped through processes of accumulation, erasure, and repetition. Working across painting and mixed media, the artist develops a visual language rooted in instinct and immediacy, where figures, symbols, and fragments of text coexist in states of tension and transformation.

The exhibition brings together two parallel bodies of work that reflect Parra’s multidisciplinary approach. Large-scale paintings and more intricate mixed media compositions function as “mental maps,” articulating a space where personal memory intersects with collective imagery. Letters, numbers, and names are repeatedly inscribed, obscured, and crossed out, disrupting their original meaning and questioning the authority of language as a fixed system.

Parra’s practice engages with a lineage of artists who have challenged the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, embracing a fluid and non-hierarchical approach to image-making. His compositions resist linear narrative, instead proposing a fragmented structure in which intuitive gestures and visual impulses take precedence over formal resolution.

Recurring iconographies - animals, skeletal forms, and cartoon-like figures -operate as shifting signifiers rather than fixed symbols. Through this interplay of image and erasure, Parra constructs a visual field in which biography is no longer a stable record, but an open and continuously renegotiated process.

Invited to Singapore by ARTitude Galeria’s founder, Ravi Thakran, Parra was present for the opening week of the exhibition alongside his spouse. During the vernissage, he created a spontaneous collaborative mural within the gallery space, extending his practice beyond the canvas. This gesture reflects the immediacy and performative dimension of his work, rooted in instinct, spontaneity, and his ongoing dialogue with street-based forms of expression.