William Lira (Caracas, Venezuela, 1962) began his artistic education in the eighties at the Fundarte Drawing and Painting workshops. He studied at the Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador, from where he graduated in 1990 with a specialization in Visual Arts. In this same institution, he was part of the Grupo Herbario, along with Onofre Frías, Félix Perdomo, Jesús Mendoza and Antonio Lazo, among other artists of outstanding presence in the Venezuelan plastic stage of those years. Besides his formal studies, he attended the Free Drawing and Painting Workshop at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas, also in Caracas.

In the first phase of his work in the nineties, he focused on the representation of the human figure. Then he turned to the representation of musical instruments. His passion for music comes from his skills as a percussionist, an experience that led him to painting. He displays musical objects and at the same time envelops them in a chromatic setting of vibrant colors. In another thematic line, and following this same resolution, he incorporates images of utilitarian objects such as pots, cups, knives, as simple and affective associations with home.

Then he directs his gaze to another aspect, urban space, and bicycles. In the compositions of cities, he recovers the urban vision about coexistence, about the character of the polis, about good living. Among abstract forms of dream cities, sketched in color, the bicycles appear in the foreground, suspended, ethereal. In William Lira’s artistic proposal, abstraction and figuration are combined with extraordinary chromatic lyricism.

This artist has had individual exhibitions in Caracas and he has participated in numerous group and biennial exhibitions in Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, the United States, Argentina, and Venezuela. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Latin American Art, in California, USA, among other important institutional and private collections.