Helwing Villamizar

Visual Artist

New York

Helwing Villamizar (b. Caracas, 1974) is a Venezuelan artist based in New York whose work investigates the layered tensions between selfhood, historical violence, and ideological power. Working across painting, digital media, and conceptual strategies, his practice explores the interplay between memory, geopolitical disruption, and systems of control through processes of fragmentation and material resistance. His work has been exhibited at MACCSI, MAO, and Sala Mendoza, and is held in private collections across the Americas and Europe. Villamizar has participated in international platforms including ULA Contemporary Art Biennial, the I Biennial of Fire at the Museo de Bellas Artes, FIA–Caracas Pública, and the Sziget Festival in Budapest. His work and essays have been published by Tráfico Visual, Fundación Telefónica, and Arraigo Group. In parallel to his studio practice, he has pursued a curatorial trajectory, co-curating the forthcoming TD Bank Curated Spotlight at NADA Miami 2025 art fair with EL CONSULADO NYC, an arts collective he co-founded.

Artworks (3)

This new sculptural work presents three small-scale 3D-printed models of the iconic Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofia Imber (MACCSI), each rendered in one of the reimagined national colors: gold (the mineral future), black (the oil sediment), and green (The bucolic in peril). Positioned as a triptych, the sculptures function as architectural miniatures and ideological fragments—three parallel readings of the same cultural institution. By stripping the building of functionality and reducing it to a symbolic object, the work reflects on the fragility of cultural infrastructure in Venezuela: how museums operate, fail to operate, or remain suspended between past ambition and present paralysis. Within the Inoperable Cities series, the MACCSI Triptych becomes a meditation on memory, extraction, and the stalled modernities that shape Caracas. It reframes the museum not as a functioning civic space but as a relic circulating across diasporic imagination, carrying the contradictions of a nation built on resources, ruin, and unrealized futures.