This interview with Aníbal Gil (b. 1932), conducted by Carlos Jiménez Gómez (b. 1930), is important for two main reasons. In the first place, it provides a very complete profile of the artist, who at the time, was working entirely on mural painting. In the second place, it refers explicitly to the fresco he painted at the Caja de Crédito Agrario, Industrial y Minero (better known as the Caja Agraria that was founded in 1931 and closed in 1999), which echoes the tradition of the muralist Pedro Nel Gómez (1899–1984), the famous painting maestro in the region of Antioquia (Medellín). Aníbal Gil won the competition that was organized in 1960 by the Caja Agraria to decide who would paint a mural on the wall of its new building. The bank invited local painters to submit proposals for murals that would reflect the Caja’s goals and activities.
Perhaps in response to the Mexican experience, mural painting became extremely popular in the Antioquia region in the 1930s. The two major exponents of this art form were Pedro Nel Gómez and Ignacio Gómez Jaramillo (1910–70), two pioneers of the genre whose subjects included urban modernization, agrarian reform, and the workers’ movement, among other themes. It should be noted that Gil began painting murals much later on, in the 1960s, at a time when a number of notable artists—all championed by the art critic Marta Traba (1923–83)—were working on nonfigurative projects. Gil was involved in printmaking in the 1960s and 1970s and as a result is considered the pioneer of “figurative modernism” in the Antioquia region according to Aníbal Gil, the book by the art historian Santiago Londoño Vélez (b. 1955), published with the help of the government of Antioquia in 2009.
Aníbal Gil attended the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Medellín from 1949 through 1953, where he took classes from the painter Rafael Sáenz (1910–98). He enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti di San Marco in Florence, Italy, in 1954. He had his first solo exhibition in 1957 at the National Library of Colombia in Bogotá. He worked as a teacher for two decades; in 1957 he began teaching drawing and visual education classes at the Facultad de Arquitectura at the Universidad Nacional at Medellín, and in 1964 he started the Taller de Grabado at the Universidad de Antioquia Instituto de Artes Plásticas. He was named director of that academic institution in 1970, a post he held until 1972.
Carlos Jiménez Gómez is an attorney and essayist. His published works include: Notas y ensayos, un intento de penetración al fenómeno antioqueño (1967), and Pedro Nel Gómez (1981).