Atelier EditionsVeronica Ruiz de Velasco
Veronica Ruiz de Velasco

The artist

Veronica Ruiz
de Velasco

A Mexican neo-figurative painter whose work has been shown in Mexico, the United States and Europe. In 1988 she became the youngest woman to hold a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. A year later her painting Homage to Swan Lake hung in the museum’s 25th-anniversary exhibition beside works by Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Rufino Tamayo. Since November 2020 she has worked from her own gallery at 313 Worth Avenue, Palm Beach.

  • BornMexico City
  • BasedPalm Beach, Florida
  • PracticeNeo-figurative painting, oil and mixed media
  • Body of workAbout 6,000 paintings and seven murals

Biography

Veronica Ruiz de Velasco was born in Mexico City. She was educated there and in Nauvoo, Illinois, and at 18 moved to London to study hotel management. She danced ballet until she was 20, when painting took hold of her. “From the very first time I laid a brush on canvas,” she says, “I knew this was my destiny.”

In 1983 she returned to Mexico City to study at La Esmeralda, the national school of painting and sculpture, and later at the Academia de San Carlos. Her first major exhibition, at the Galería Lourdes Chumacero in 1984, brought her to the attention of Mexico’s leading painters. That year she met Jean Dubuffet in Paris to talk about technique. Rufino Tamayo invited her to his studio for private lessons, and from 1985 to 1988 she studied privately with Gilberto Aceves Navarro, whom she considers her most important teacher.

Every painting in Fantasmas de Otoño (1986) sold. In November 1988 she opened two exhibitions at once: Tras Bambalinas, nineteen works in homage to Andrew Lloyd Webber, at the Museo de Arte Moderno, and a series of monumental ballet and modern-dance works at Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport.

In 1989 she completed a 15-by-3-metre mural for the ABC Medical Center in Mexico City, painted over nearly a year. U.S. Ambassador Charles J. Pilliod Jr. inaugurated it, and Prince Charles, then Prince of Wales, visited days later and called it “Wonderful!”

In 1996 she moved to Dallas, where she spent the next 24 years. There she painted a portrait of President Bill Clinton, the Love Paradise mural at UT Southwestern Medical Center, a full-size airplane suspended in the International Terminal at Dallas–Fort Worth Airport, and the September/October 2007 cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In 2009 she was one of a select group of Mexican artists chosen to paint a work representing Mexico at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

In November 2020 she opened Gallery Veronica Ruiz de Velasco on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, the first gallery devoted only to her work. Since then she has exhibited at the Salon International d’Art Contemporain at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris (2023) and appeared as a Spotlight Artist at the Hamptons Fine Art Fair (2024).

“My art is all about emotions. I pour my heart into every brushstroke and every color choice.”

Education & training

Teachers & mentors

Influences: Paul Cézanne, Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Francisco Goya.

Selected exhibitions

Murals & commissions

Collections

Private

  • President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton
  • David Rockefeller
  • Hugh Hefner
  • Nancy B. Hamon
  • Judge Jeanine Pirro

Corporate

  • Playboy Collection, Chicago
  • Goodyear
  • Lucent Technologies, Mesquite, Texas
  • AT&T, Las Colinas, Texas
  • Nordstrom, Dallas

Press & television

Letters

The gallery

Gallery Veronica Ruiz de Velasco
313 Worth Avenue, Palm Beach, Florida 33480

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