Cecilia Vargas was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1957. She began her further education in her home country before immigrating to London in 1984 to take foundation studies at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. Since completing her MA at the Royal College of Art, where she received several awards, Vargas has established herself as an abstract painter.
Painter Cecilia Vargas was born in 1957 in Bogotá, Colombia. She first studied philosophy and literature at the Universidad de los Andes. In 1984, she relocated to London to pursue a career in art, beginning with a foundation course at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in Chelsea. She went on to complete a BA in Painting at Chelsea School of Art in 1988, followed by an MA at the Royal College of Art in 1990. During her postgraduate studies, she was invited by Professor Paul Huxley to join the Royal College of Art’s selection committee and was awarded both the Alkazzi Scholarship and a travel grant to Paris. She later returned to the institution as part of the judging panel for the Basil and Ali H. Alkazzi Awards.
Vargas is an abstract painter whose works span oils, acrylics, gouache, and mixed media, with a wide array of supports including canvas, paper, board, Perspex, silk, and plastic sheeting. While she has maintained a long-standing interest in traditional materials like canvas for its durability and lightness, paper has also held a distinct significance in her practice for its immediacy and intimacy. Since the mid-1990s, she has worked extensively on MDF board, often combining it with Perspex to explore layering and textural density. More recently, her experiments in collage have reintroduced geometric clarity into her compositions, recalling her earlier work from the 1990s. These include stark juxtapositions of monoprints, torn paper, and fragments of her own drawings. Across mediums, her work is defined by a careful attention to the formal and material possibilities of abstraction, often stripped down to elemental forms and bold colour fields. Vargas’s paintings combine formal restraint with sensuous tactility. Her abstract compositions often evoke natural topographies, bringing to mind bays, ridges, fields, or strata, but do so without settling into legible landscapes. She employs a muted, earthy palette and soft tonal transitions, juxtaposed with blocks of dense pigment or scored surfaces. Textures are layered to create visual depth, while suggesting erosion and embedded time. Despite their stillness, the works imply quiet movement, offering meditative space rather than spectacle.
Vargas has exhibited widely over a career spanning more than three decades. She has held regular solo exhibitions in London since the 1990s, including Analogies (1996) and Recent Paintings (1994) at the Paton Gallery., which championed new graduates. Between 2007 and 2024, she organised yearly solo presentations at her London studio at the Chocolate Factory N16, a community of artists’ spaces in north London. These exhibitions, which were curated and presented within her working space, served as both intimate viewings and public engagements. Her solo shows have also taken place internationally, such as Cosas del Agua (1999) and Micrografías (1998) at Galería Diners in Bogotá. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in London, including Into the Nineties II at the Mall Galleries (1990); Art 96 at the Business Design Centre (1996); Politics, Art and Religion at the Barbican Centre, and Six Colombian Artists at Gimpel Gils (1991). Her work has also been presented at the Cologne Art Fair and the Miami Art Fair. In 2021, her paintings featured in the Abstract Art Exhibition at the Brick Lane Gallery in London's East End, and in 2010, she exhibited at the Granger Gallery in Whitstable, Kent. Her abstract canvases have been shown in settings ranging from large commercial art fairs to academic institutions and cultural centres.
Cecilia Vargas lives and works in London, England where she maintains a studio practice and she regularly participates in open studio events. In UK public collections, Cecilia Vargas' works can be found in the collections of the Bank of England Museum and the Royal College of Art.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Cecilia Vargas]
Publications related to [Cecilia Vargas] in the Ben Uri Library