Valeria Alfonso

Valeria Alfonso Caraballo is a Colombian painter, born in Bogotá in 1999, who lives and works in Bogotá. She studied visual arts at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and spent 2022–2023 on an academic exchange in art history at the Freie Universität Berlin. Before that, in 2017, she had taken part in the Portfolio Course of the Berlin Art Institute.

In an essay published by Galería El Museo in Bogotá for her 2025 exhibition there, Felipe Rocha describes canvases dense with trees, scrub, hills and frailejones, and with windows and rooms, chairs, cups and teapots. He places Italo Calvino’s idea of multiplicity at the center of her painting. Rocha quotes her 2023 degree project in visual arts at the Javeriana, Interludios entre parpadeos: “Al pintar de verdad, sale solamente una cosa – un solo momento” (when one truly paints, only one thing comes out, a single moment).

In July and August 2024 Galería El Museo included her landscapes in Visiones de la naturaleza, a group exhibition on the dialogue between art and the natural world. In May and June 2025 the gallery showed her paintings beside those of Gabriel Silva (b. 1955) in Entre visiones y lugares, which it presented as a dialogue between an established and an emerging painter. In January and February 2026 she held a residency in the Berlin Art Institute’s Studio Program. After the open call Colombia en el Mundo: Portafolio Cultural Internacional, Colombia’s Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Traditional Knowledges put forward a shortlist of finalists, from which she was selected after review and interview. Her project for the residency, Between Bes, was a painting-based research project that intertwined images from Bogotá with direct experience in Berlin.

On March 12, 2026, she opened Entre ves, a body of work shaped by her movement between Bogotá and Berlin. Galería El Museo included her in Pintura inmortal in July and August 2026, and in September listed two of her paintings in its presentation at ARTBO Feria 2026.