Danilo Dueñas Won the DAD Fellowship in Visual Arts
Danilo Dueñas has been awarded the DAAD Fellowship in Berlin (2011-2012). He is the first Colombian artist to receive this international honor, joining, amongst others, Daniel Buren, Damien Hirst, Jannis Kounellis, Ilya Kabakov, and Gabriel Orozco.
The DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm is the most important government sponsored cultural program in Germany, and one of the most prestigious in the world. The scope of the program is large and encompasses literature, music, cinema, and the visual arts from Europe, America, Asia, and Africa.
The program was conceived by the Ford Foundation and began in 1963 as a direct response to the construction of the Berlin Wall. DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) took over the project in 1965 and has provided the forum and events through which authors from a varied group of cultures and nationalities have passed: Susan Sontag, Gao Xingjian, and Mario Vargas Llosa amongst them. The same can be said for cinema, where Andrei Tarkovsky, István Szabó, and Jean- Philippe Toussaint come to mind. In music, the figures of Igor Stranvinsky, John Cage, and Alberto Ginastera are some of the prominent names.
Danilo Dueñas was born in 1956 in Cali, Colombia. He Lives and works in Bogotá. He has been a Professor at the Art Department of Los Andes University, the School of Fine Arts of the National University of Colombia and at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University since 1990. In 1995, he participated in the exhibitions Mesótica and Transatlántica, curated by Carlos Basualdo at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San José de Costa Rica and the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts in Caracas, respectively. In 1999, he was the recipient of the Johnnie Walker in the Arts Award granted by Paulo Herkenhoff, for his installation "Espacio Preservado II", presented at the Luis Ángel Arango Library. In 2001, two simultaneous retrospective exhibitions of his works were held at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá and the Museum of Art of the National University of Colombia. In 2003, another retrospective exhibition was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas. In 2006, he was the international guest at the Caracas FIA and in 2008 he presented "Dentro del espacio expositivo" at Periférico Caracas, curated by Jesus Fuenmayor. His works are also represented in the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro.
