About Me
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Why Alexgringo?
Growing up with Colombian parents in London, I spent most of my childhood navigating two worlds. Never fully of either.
When I moved to Colombia at nineteen, a nickname followed quickly. Alexgringo.
A name with edges in it. A word that said: you are from here, and you are from somewhere else. Both things at once.
I could have taken offence. But instead, I recognised something true in it. The tension was not something to resolve. It was something to carry.
Something to make art from. That is what the name holds. Not a contradiction, but a conversation.
Born and raised in the UK to Colombian parents, I grew up between two worlds, belonging fully to neither, shaped quietly by both. From a young age, art was the one language that felt like home; it came naturally.
At nineteen, I took a leap across the Atlantic. I moved to Colombia to study Graphic Design and Illustration, learning in a language I was still growing into, in a country that was written into my blood but still felt new. Four years later, I graduated with a diploma, a nickname that had become part of my identity, and a way of seeing the world that has never left me.
For two decades, I worked as a graphic designer and photographer across industries, across continents. The creative instinct was always there. But painting, the real art of painting, waited.
In 2021, a difficult period in my life became the threshold. Facing uncertainty and personal challenges, I returned to the canvas, not as a hobby, but as a necessity. Every brushstroke was a way of processing what I could not yet articulate. The work that came out of that time surprised me. It was raw, more honest, and more mine than anything I had made before.
I have been painting continuously ever since. The themes that run through my work: identity, mental health, culture, and the human condition, were not chosen. They arrived. As did the spiritual dimension that now quietly informs everything I make.
Someone I loved believed I was meant to do this. I am still, in some ways, making work for her.
Artist Statement
My work begins where language runs out.
Rooted in expressionism, a foundation laid during my A-level studies in London and deepened through years of formal training in graphic design in Colombia.
I make paintings and digital works that move across identity, mental health, culture and the human condition.
Not as subjects to be illustrated, but as forces to be felt.
I am drawn to the things we carry but rarely examine. The tension between where we come from and who we become. The beauty that exists alongside struggle, not despite it. The moments that reshape us quietly, without announcement.
Colour and texture are my primary tools. Broad brushwork, palette knife, layered surfaces, I build work that has weight. That asks the viewer to slow down. To look twice.
I do not make work that resolves. I make work that opens. A piece is finished not when I have said everything, but when I have left enough space for the viewer to bring something of their own.
A conversation between old souls.
That is what this work has always been reaching for.
At nineteen, I left London for Colombia with imperfect Spanish, an eagerness to learn, and a need to understand a part of myself that had always been present but never fully explored.
I studied Graphic Design and Illustration in Spanish, under pressure, in a system that required me to work twice as hard to keep up. That pressure shaped something in me. Difficulty, I learned early, is not the opposite of growth.Four years later, I graduated. I left with a diploma, a fluency I had earned, a perspective on colour and form that still lives in my work today, and a name,
Alexgringo, that followed me home.
Colombia is not a distant chapter. It is woven into how I see. The warmth of it. The contradiction of it. The beauty that exists in places the world has not always been kind to. I carry it in the work.