Hugo Zapata, one of Colombia’s most revered contemporary artists and a master sculptor whose black stone works transformed the country’s relationship with landscape, form, and time, has died at the age of 80 in his home in El Retiro, Antioquia.
Zapata, born in 1945 in La Tebaida, Quindío, in the heart of Colombia’s coffee-growing region, was an artist whose dialogue with the earth yielded a lifelong body of work that feels at once primeval and deeply modern. His sculptures, hewn from volcanic black stone – particularly Lutita, quarried from the Río Negro valley in Cundinamarca – adorn public spaces, academic institutions, and private collections across the country. They are not just artistic interventions, but geological witnesses – “Testigos,” as he titled one of his most powerful series — to the forces that shape both earth and human consciousness.
“I’m just the interpreter of what the stone wants to say,” Zapata told The City Paper in an exclusive interview (Edition 135) back in 2019. “Before mankind was drawing in caves, Earth was writing its destiny.”
An artist who felt at ease with audiences, and participated actively in major art fairs, Zapata in many ways considered Bogotá his second home. In 2019, just months before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, his gallery representatives Sextante / Arte Dos Gráfico hosted a major retrospective of his work at Bogotá’s José Celestino Mutis Botanical Gardens, titled “UBICUIDADES”. This show was a meditation on the convergence of art and place, and will, in many ways, be remembered as the artist’s final homage to the Colombian capital.
Zapata’s profound connection to stone began in boyhood. “Ever since I was young, I would collect stones from the garden, fascinated by their textures,” he recalled. “Some had fossils, others veins of quartz. Each was a code waiting to be deciphered – a trace of time’s passage.”
Though he initially trained in visual arts at the University of Antioquia, he eventually pivoted to architecture, graduating in 1972 from the Universidad Nacional in Medellín. “My work has always had a strong relationship with urban contexts,” he said. “I am a keen observer of physical spaces. Architecture gave me a structure — but it was stone that gave me a language.”
A language that was neither minimalist nor decorative, but elemental. In series like Cantos de la Tierra and Ojos de Agua, Zapata carved hollowed stone pieces to allow for interplay between form and elemental forces — fire, water, air — invoking the sacred geometry of Andean and Mesoamerican cosmologies.
“In Ojos de Agua, I sought to recreate how the Incas studied the cosmos through the reflection of water,” Zapata said. “They read the ring of light that shimmered on its surface, aligned with celestial bodies, to decide when to sow or harvest. That duality of the visible and invisible is what I call ‘paisaje rescatado’ — the rescued landscape.”
His works often carry animal symbolism – howler monkeys in stone with open mouths that seem to roar from the earth’s core. “In Central American cultures, the monkey was seen as a guardian of the sacred. I wanted that energy – not representation, but evocation,” he explained.
Zapata was not concerned with artistic trends or theoretical jargon. “Many refer to their work as ‘conceptual,’” he said with a smile. “I don’t manage those terms well. What moves me is when people speak of metals, of landscape, of elements — that’s the only conceptual framework I need.”
It was precisely this elemental honesty that defined his now-famous Río de Mercurio, a work born from an aerial view of the Cauca River. “One evening, I looked down from a plane and saw the shimmering line of the river like a serpent. I remembered how mercury is used to extract gold from rock, polluting that sacred waterway. That image haunted me. The work was not planned. It was a response.”
Beyond the poetic, Zapata’s work also embraced public memory and civic engagement. He was instrumental in the campaign Medellín Abraza Su Historia that called for the demolition of the Monaco Building, a symbol of the city’s drug cartel violence. “Temples to a religion of evil must disappear,” he said. “But we should never forget. With the work Valientes, I created 100 stone cubes, each one given to a victim. They will be buried as part of a new monument — not to the perpetrators, but to the dignity of those who suffered.”
Throughout his career, Zapata remained a staunch believer in art as a force for inclusion, not exclusion. “My work Ágora, at EAFIT University, became a meeting space for students. They renamed it La Plazoleta de los Estudiantes. That is the greatest compliment – when people inhabit your work without needing to intellectualize it.”
While the surface of Zapata’s stones often shone with a polished sheen, what lay within was a memory etched by geological time. In his monograph Escrituras, he explored the markings hidden inside Lutita. “When I cut the stone, I discover writings,” he said. “Written not by me, but by nature, with the fingerprints of time. That’s when the romance begins.”
And yet, despite decades of acclaim, Zapata remained humbly astonished by the process of discovery. “I wake up every day with the same curiosity I had as a child,” he said. “There’s always something hidden in the stone. And as long as there is something to uncover, there is something to create.”
That spirit of tireless exploration, of communion with the Earth’s deepest memory, will remain his legacy. His work may be carved in stone, but his spirit lives in the spaces between — in the silences of gardens, the corners of cities, the shadowed cracks of mountains, and the imaginations of all who encountered his art.
As he once said, “Colombia is a land of rock. Scrape the surface, and a stone appears. It is my privilege to listen.”
Hugo Zapata is survived by his family, a devoted community of students, and a landscape forever altered by his craftmanship. His stones will continue to speak – and we, if we listen carefully, will always hear him.
Interview with sculptor Hugo Zapata: The soul of the stone