Giorgio Celin Colombia, b. 1986

iorgio Celin was born in 1986 in Barranquilla, Colombia, a city on the Atlantic coast known for its legendary carnival, inscribed on the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2003. He grew up in Italy and has since lived and worked across several European cities, currently based between Barcelona and Naples. A self-taught artist, Celin developed his practice outside formal academic structures, drawing instead on personal experience, visual culture, and a sustained engagement with the history of painting. His work has been described as a personal diary: an ongoing, autobiographical record of migration, desire, and the search for belonging.

Celin's paintings are figurative, warm, and charged with emotional tension. Working in oil on canvas, often at large scale, he constructs scenes of intimacy between figures whose gender is deliberately undefined, whose bodies dissolve into one another in embraces, dances, and moments of quiet closeness. The palette moves between intensity and delicacy, from overwrought reds and electric blues to cloud-like passages of near-calm, and the figures carry a visible sense of sorrow in their expressions and postures, as if they might disappear at any moment. Insignia of queer subculture merge with the formal language of his Colombian heritage and European visual traditions, while the influence of Japanese comics from the 1970s gives his compositions a graphic directness and a quality of virtuosic economy. His work explores an intersectionality of queerness and immigration, raising questions of belonging and exclusion that are rooted in lived experience but resonate far beyond it. Works such as Feelin So Alone... (2023), hands (2022), and Dream A Little Dream Of Me (2020) exemplify the tenderness and melancholy that define his visual language. In 2022, the exhibition Graduation was accompanied by the publication Painting = Poetry, featuring works from 2018 to the present alongside texts by Cecilia Monteleone, Paul Clinton, Jaider Orsini, and Maria Gaia Redavid, published by Ludvig Rage and edited by Olivia Hontas.

Celin has exhibited at institutions internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO) (2019) and the Fondazione Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venice. He has also undertaken residencies in Colombia and Italy. His work is held in international private collections.

Giorgio Celin participated in the artist-in-residence program at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin in 2022. The residency resulted in Graduation, his first solo exhibition in Berlin, presented at 68projects, Fasanenstrasse 68, from 2 July to 3 September 2022. The exhibition brought together paintings reflecting his migratory journey and his experience as a queer person in the 21st century, with figures inhabiting spaces between European metropolises and his native Barranquilla. KORNFELD Galerie Berlin also presented Celin's work at Art Busan, South Korea (2022); Untitled Art, Miami Beach (2022); and Expo Chicago (2023). In 2024, he was included in Berlin on My Mind, the group exhibition at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin celebrating ten years of the gallery's artist-in-residence program. His practice continues to expand its reach, carrying with it an insistence on the visibility of those who exist at the margins of both geography and identity.