Jhon Fitzgerald

Jhon Fitzgerald (b. 1977), whose full name El Colombiano gives as John Andrés Fitzgerald Serna, is a Colombian sculptor who works in sheet iron and is known as “el escultor de la paz” (the sculptor of peace). He was born in Cali, moved with his family to Medellín as a child, and grew up in Santa Rosa de Cabal, Risaralda. The surname comes from Irish forebears; “Soy la tercera, cuarta generación en Colombia de irlandeses” (I am the third, fourth generation of Irish in Colombia), he said in a Radio France Internationale interview, as El Colombiano reported.

He studied in Mauricio Sequeda's drawing workshops in Medellín; he began with painting and leaned toward sculpture through geometry and color. El Colombiano names Edgar Negret, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar and Omar Rayo, “que son los geométricos” (who are the geometric ones), as his inspiration, and says that coming to know the Venezuelans Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Soto took him further: “Para mí Soto es el mejor escultor del mundo” (for me Soto is the best sculptor in the world). Caracol Radio describes his sculptures in iron sheet as hermeneutic in concept, forming more than one image depending on where the viewer stands. His collection Recuerdos de infancia (childhood memories) includes Barquito de papel (paper boat), folded sheet iron with hand-drawn details, which he posted on Instagram in November 2023.

His public monuments include El campeón, a homage to the cyclist Egan Bernal in Zipaquirá, and in Santa Rosa de Cabal a monument to the fallen heroes and a monument to chorizo. In 2018 he exhibited in France in Escultores en la isla. On August 30, 2020, in central Bogotá, he had his mouth sewn shut and began an indefinite hunger strike, demanding government action on the violence in the country and a negotiation of guarantees for artists. The same day he gave an iron sculpture to the family of Dilan Cruz, the young man killed during the 2019 protests, with a plaque reading “Las armas no son la excusa. La educación lo es todo” (weapons are not the excuse; education is everything).

In July 2024 Caracol Radio reported that he had recently proposed, at the 26th anniversary of the Congreso Hispanoamericano de Periodismo in New York, “cambiar armas por arte” (trading weapons for art), a plan to draw young people away from crime by teaching them to make art. From April 16 to May 18, 2026 the Centro Felicidad Chapinero in Bogotá showed Cuerpos de hierro, huellas de papel, persiguiendo la felicidad, which joined his sculpture with the archive of the Stonewall Museum LGBTI de Colombia on the wounds violence has left in different communities. In June 2026 ROMAG reported that at the opening of Ecdisis, a permanent room at the Museo de la Policía for art by prisoners and former prisoners, he showed a previously unseen work made for the space.