Biography and Exhibition Chronology
(1917 - 2025)
Leo Matiz Espinosa is born on April 1st in Aracataca, Colombia, the "Macondo" of Gabriel García Márquez.
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1933- He publishes his first caricatures in the magazine Civilización and holds his first exhibition of them at the Excélsior confectionery in Santa Marta (Colombia).​
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1935 - He founds the magazine Lauros in Santa Marta and enrolls in the National School of Fine Arts in Bogotá.
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1937 - Enrique Santos, "Calibán," director of the newspaper El Tiempo, encourages Matiz to work in photography for the publication and gives him a camera. He studies in the workshop of the painter and photographer Luis B. Ramos.
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1939 - He undertakes his first tour of Colombia as a photojournalist for special collaborations in the magazine Estampa and the newspapers El Tiempo and El Espectador
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1940 - In 1940, he left Barranquilla for Mexico. He arrives in Panama, and on October 12th of that same year, he exhibits photographs and caricatures in San José, Costa Rica. Months later, in El Salvador, he exhibits photographs, drawings, caricatures, and paintings, along with the Costa Rican engraver Francisco Amighetti.
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1941 - He arrives in Mexico via Tapachula, Chiapas. In July 1941, Leo Matiz exhibited drawings and photographs at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, alongside four very important Colombian artists: Julio Abril, Luis Alberto Acuña, Juan Sanz de Santamaría, and Rómulo Rozo. The exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and engravings by Colombian artists residing in Mexico was held to commemorate the 131st anniversary of Colombia’s Independence.
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1942 - Leo Matiz secured work as a photojournalist for important Mexican illustrated magazines such as Así, Hoy, and Nosotros. He joined Así magazine on the recommendation of the Colombian poet Porfirio Barba Jacob. He collaborated in eighty-seven issues of this magazine between 1941 and 1945;
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he participated in seven issues of Hoy magazine between 1941 and 1943; and he worked on twenty-three issues of Nosotros magazine between 1944 and 1945. He exhibits at the Decoración art gallery in Mexico City and joins the Mexican Cinematographic Union as a set photographer, with the support of Gabriel Figueroa and Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Also in Mexico, he ventured into the film world and worked as a stillman on several films. In 1942, for El circo (dir. Miguel M. Delgado) and La virgen que forjó una patria (dir. Julio Bracho); in 1945, for Lo que va de ayer a hoy (dir. Juan Bustillo Oro), El puente del castigo (dir. Miguel M. Delgado), Nuestros maridos (dir. Víctor Urruchúa), and Las cinco advertencias de Satanás (dir. Julián Soler); and in 1946, for La devoradora (dir. Fernando de Fuentes). In 1947, he worked on the still photography for the film Fiesta (dir. Richard Thorpe / Prod. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) for the United States. He conducts the first film castings for the actress María Félix. The actors and actresses who participated in the films for which Leo Matiz did still photography include Mario Moreno "Cantinflas," Gloria Marín, Dolores del Río, Esther Fernández, María Félix, Fernando Soler, Domingo Soler, Julio Villarreal, Rosario Granados, Abel Salazar, Rafael Baledón, Emili Guiu, Esther Williams, Beatriz Aguirre, among others.
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1943 - He holds the exhibition Tipos y costumbres de México (Types and Customs of Mexico) in his own studio in the Mexican capital, with the support of the writer Jorge Zalamea, Colombia's ambassador to that nation.
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1945 - He meets the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel and shows him his photographic work on the marginalized people of Mexico City, material that also inspired Buñuel for his film Los olvidados (The Forgotten Ones) (1952). The Mexican press awards him the prize for the Best Photojournalist in Mexico.
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1946 - He participates as a set photographer in the film Fiesta brava, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, directed by Mr. Thorpe, and starring American actress Esther Williams and actors Ricardo Montalbán, Akim Tamiroff, Fortunio Bonanova, John Carroll, and Manolo Escudero.
Empower
Growth
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​1947 - He joins Selecciones del Reader's Digest magazine and travels to various countries in Central and South America, capturing color photos for the covers of that publication, in its Spanish edition. Between 1947 and 1951, his photographs appeared in twenty-five issues. In New York, he produces reports for Life and Norte magazines as a special envoy to South America.
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He participated in twenty-three issues of Norte from 1945 to 1948. He exhibits in a collective show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NY. He works with the muralist painter David Alfaro Siqueiros on the Cuauhtémoc contra el mito (Cuauhtémoc Against the Myth) mural project. He denounces David Alfaro Siqueiros in the international press for the plagiarism of his photographs in a series of paintings exhibited at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico. His Mexico City studio is set on fire, and he leaves Mexico under the atmosphere of persecution and confrontation carried out by Siqueiros against Matiz.
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1948 - He travels to Bogotá to cover the IX Pan-American Conference for Life magazine and is wounded in the popular uprising caused by the assassination of the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. That same day, Matiz had a scheduled appointment with Gaitán, who was going to introduce him to the young Fidel Castro. As a special observer for the UN in the Middle East, he witnesses the attack on the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, and the images of the assassinated mediator are disseminated by all international press agencies.
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1949 - He is recognized by the international press as one of the ten best photographers in the world.
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1950 - In Colombia, along with the poet Álvaro Mutis, he produces a series of reports on oil and the Magdalena River.
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1951 - He founds the first art gallery in Colombia and exhibits the paintings of Fernando Botero for the first time at the Leo Matiz Art Gallery. Matiz's gallery becomes the epicenter of Bogotá's cultural life, along with Café Automático, a center of the country's intellectual bohemia frequented by writers and artists such as León de Greiff, Jorge Zalamea, Gabriel García Márquez, and Fernando Botero.
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1952 - He holds the second exhibition of the Colombian painter Fernando Botero at the Leo Matiz Art Gallery.
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1958 - He joins the Venezuelan magazine Momento as a photojournalist and, along with Gabriel García Márquez, who also works at the publication, covers the fall of the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Caracas. Matiz's photographs of the popular insurrection against the dictatorship are published in Paris Match, among others.
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1976 - He works as a photographer for Cinefilm on the movie El pez que fuma (The Smoking Fish), by Venezuelan filmmaker Román Chalbaud.
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1978 - He returns to Colombia and, a victim of a mugging in Bogotá, loses his left eye. Impacted by this event, he takes refuge on a farm north of Bogotá and gives up photography for a time.
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1988 - The Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá holds a traveling retrospective of his work throughout Colombia, in homage to his fifty years of work as an artist and photographer.
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1992 -The Il Diafragma Gallery organizes a retrospective along with the Province of Milan, with the publication of Leo Matiz, fotografie, his first book edited in Europe, by Art-Studio Edizioni.
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1994 - The Carla Sozzani gallery in Milan holds a collective and traveling exhibition in Europe and the United States centered on the figure of Frida Kahlo, featuring forty-five portraits taken by photographers Leo Matiz, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Fritz Henle, Guillermo Kahlo, Lucienne Bloch, Gisèle Freund, Bernard Silberstein, and Emmy Lou Packard. The Queens College Art Center in New York presents the exhibition Visión de un continente (Vision of a Continent). He participates in the traveling exhibition through the Italian regions of Tuscany and Umbria called América Latina 1900-1993, Racconti fotografici d’autore (Latin America 1900-1993, Photographic Tales by Authors), which includes photographs by Leo Matiz, Agustín Víctor Casasola, Fernando Paillet, and Alicia D’Amico, curated by Giuliana Scimé.
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1995 - He returns to Europe to receive the Horus Sicof award in Milan. He is named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. He exhibits at L’Espace Photográphique de Paris, now the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. Leo Matiz, Gabriel García Márquez, Álvaro Mutis, and Manuel Zapata Olivella were some of the Colombian artists invited to the 17th edition of the Latin American Film and Culture Festival. Publication of the book El tercer ojo (The Third Eye), Ediciones Gamma, Bogotá. The Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan exhibits the show Los personajes de Leo Matiz (The Characters of Leo Matiz).
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1996 - In Italy, he resumes studio photography after 16 years, inspired by working with an Italian model, who motivated his return to this activity. He visits the town of Timau, in Veneto, where the origins of the Matiz surname are located, and does a report there for two weeks. He holds several exhibitions in Italy, France, and Greece with the National Federation of Coffee Growers.}
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1997 - After a 50-year absence, he returns to Mexico and produces the book Los hombres del campo (The Men of the Countryside), edited in Japan. He receives the Filo d’Argento award in Florence, at the Palazzo Vecchio. He exhibits at the Giubbe Rosse café in Florence: "Matiz-Siqueiros, fifty years later: art for art's sake."
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1998 - The Colombian Government pays him tribute and recognizes him as the most important photographer in Colombia in the 20th century and edits the book Leo Matiz: la metáfora del ojo (Leo Matiz: The Metaphor of the Eye) for the event, with the curation of Alejandra Matiz, the creation of a CD-ROM, and a television documentary. The National Library of Colombia and the Galería Diners join this tribute by holding exhibitions of Leo Matiz's photographic work. He creates and legally establishes the Leo Matiz Foundation with his daughter Alejandra Matiz. He passes away in Bogotá on October 24th with his passport in hand for a trip to Mexico for a tribute prepared for him at the Postal Museum in Mexico City. He leaves an important historical legacy that is managed by the Leo Matiz Foundation in Mexico. After his death, his daughter Alejandra Matiz has continued his legacy to the present day.