Mario Vélez studied Fine Arts at the National University of Colombia in Medellín. In 1992, he traveled to Vienna, where he studied drawing at the University of Fine Arts, and he then returned home to finalize his studies and earn his degree in Fine Arts. After graduating in 1995, he moved to Germany and completed a Master’s Degree in Painting at the University of Arts in Berlin, where he studied with the renowned German painter Karl Horst Hödicke.

Early on as a student, his inclination for painting was a determining factor in his artistic practice. His painting stems from a triangulation created from his relationship with pre-Columbian art, German expressionism, and later on the approach to abstract painting learned in New York. The direction of Velez's creative process arises from his approximation to color, derived from the influence of German expressionism, his interaction with abstractionism, and his perspective of the socio-cultural experience of his environment. There is an evident mediation between the body, territory, light, and nature which results in an escape through the art of painting. Drawing an axis from the practices that derive and feed the work of Vélez, there are always two major coordinates that bring us closer to the farthest confines of two-dimensional space. The first one is a journey towards the primitive, a search to capture the exotic that is so much our own and that brings us to the primal nature of our culture. And the second coordinate is the essence of our past.

In perspective, his work is constantly linked to the body and to the reflection posed by the territory and the universe. Always as a support and guide on a journey where he transmits the heritage that is in the spatial structure of the face and bones and that endures among us through the memory of his painting.