Antonio Caro is a contemporary artist known for using conceptualizations and iconic visuals that often make political commentary about his home country. Since 1970, Caro has built a career that, according to the categorizations of history and criticism, denotes an authentic example of conceptual art in Colombia. Since then, Caro's work has proposed a critical eye on social and political conditions in his country, as to their academic and popularly understood historical connotations. Caro's work is achieved through the implementation of informal procedures in traditional artistic practice, including photocopying, public installations, lectures, posters, and materials related to indigenous cultural practices, such as salt or achiote

Achiote

Achiote is a shrub or small tree from the tropical region of the Americas. The name derives from the Nahuatl word for the shrub, achiotl. It is also known as Aploppas, and its original Tupi name urucu. It is cultivated there and in Southeast Asia, where it was introduced by the Spanish in the...

. The vast majority of his work makes use of text as a tool to communicate strong messages, but instead acquires the paradoxical nuances of a political nature as a means of production and dissemination. One may classify Caro's art as politically charged pop art

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

. In 1998, Caro received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

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Some of his important works include: Sal (1971), Imperialism is a paper tiger (1972), there is no art here (1972), There is no case (1974), Colombia-Marlboro (1975), Colombia 1977 (1977), Defend your talent (1977), all very Caro (1978), Homage to Manuel Quintin Lame (1979), Project 500 (1987), Annatto, among others.

• Sullivan, Edward J., Latin American Art in the Twentieth-Century. Phaidon Press Limited; London, 1996. pg. 177.
• La Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango del Banco de la República - www.lablaa.org - Bogotá, Colombia
• http://www.lablaa.org/warhol/colombia/caro.html
• http://www.gf.org/fellows/all?index=c&page=4
• www.artfacts.net