The OG Creative: Edo Sanabria Brings Latin American Pop Art into its Coolness Era
Forget everything you think you know about Latin American art. Edo Sanabria isn’t here to fit into a category, he’s here to rewrite it. But Sanabria isn’t just another artist with colourful canvases. He is an experience, along with his art.
From Chronicler to Creator
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Sanabria began not as a painter but as a chronicler. Like Warhol sketching for fashion magazines, Basquiat selling street postcards, or Venezuela’s own kinetic master Carlos Cruz-Diez that started in graphic humor, Sanabria began drawing for the country’s leading newspapers. Those years honed his line, his sense of narrative, and his eye for symbols that could move people.
Over decades, he has explored diverse techniques, from ink to acrylic, from small-scale pieces to immersive murals. These are not simply decorative; they’re conceptual art meant to open conversations, to make audiences pause and reflect on topics they thought they knew. “Art to connect to our roots,” as Sanabria puts it.
The Global Rise of Latin American Art
Many Latin Americans living abroad look for ways to reconnect with their cultural origins. That, combined with the immediacy of social media and the hunger for colour and symbolism in a minimalistic global culture, has made Latin American work newly compelling. According to ArtTactic, a leading provider of art market research and analysis, sales of Latin American Modern & Contemporary artworks at galleries such as Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips jumped 24% in 2022 alone. Major galleries in New York, London, and Seoul are giving prime space to artists who once would have been consigned to “regional” shows.
The result is a wave of colour, symbolism, and narrative energy breaking into traditionally restrained art capitals. Sanabria isn’t just part of that movement—he’s contributing to its direction. His pieces vibrate with nostalgia delivered through playfulness and colour, offering a lighter, more inviting path into serious themes. It is no surprise, then, that his fourth exhibition, Conductores de un País, received invitations swiftly from Seoul, Milan, Tokyo, New York, Monaco, Aruba, and other important locations around the world.
The “Glocal” Approach
Sanabria uses “glocal” to describe his work: A visual proposal that feels global, but keeps people connected to their local roots. Campbell’s soup is global; so is the arepa. In his series Arepa Mundi, twenty flavours of Venezuela’s most popular food became conceptual sculptures and screen prints. “What makes something pop isn’t just mass consumption,” he says. “It’s that it crosses social classes. Pop is democratic.”
Pop Icons, Reimagined
The same playful revolution runs through his collection Timeless Influencers, where figures including Einstein, the Beatles, and Picasso are reimagined as if they had Instagram accounts. Marilyn Monroe appears tropicalised with Venezuelan flowers and Asian crowns. In Entre Giocondas y Meninas, he tackles two of art history’s most popular icons with double-perspective sculptures encapsulated in hand-polished acrylic. Color here is not just decorative but a way of signalling joy, resilience, and belonging; and the incorporation of Latin American elements is designed to spark conversation anywhere.
This insistence on narrative depth is exactly what catches the eye of collectors. Each series emerges from years of research; many become books that compile not just images of his work but the stories behind them. They are conversational pieces in every sense: the kind of art that collectors don’t just hang, but want to talk about. Surprisingly, and unlike many artists who prefer to confine themselves to small canvases, Sanabria embraces scale, alluding even more to his talent as an artist. With the creation of murals that have become part of the visual history of epic locations, they catch the eye of passers-by who may never enter a gallery. Latin America’s great cities have long used walls as public canvases, and Sanabria inherits that tradition but infuses it with pop iconography and humour.
“Walls, whose function is to confine and separate, open portals to marvelous worlds and characters with Edo Sanabria’s work,” one collaborator writes.
The Democratic Medium of Murals
For Sanabria, murals are the ultimate democratic medium and a way of taking art out of private hands and back into the street. In the coming years, expect more of these large-scale interventions in main cities and capitals across the globe.
Latin America has produced some great artists, and Sanabria’s combination of accessible iconography, rigorous research, and large-scale public work is positioning him as one of them. He is now entering what some fellow peers call “Edo Next Level”, a phase that leans further into abstraction while retaining his signature narrative, and that represents how he has evolved from a Venezuelan artist to a global one. His murals, pop art reinterpretations, and “glocal” ethos are turning Latin American nostalgia and mass culture into a visual language that continues to gain international recognition.
The OG of Latin American Pop Art
It won’t be long before people start seeing more of it in the places that define contemporary art worldwide. In a market hungry for authentic stories and bold visuals, Sanabria offers both: an OG of pop art from Latin America whose next chapter may redefine the conversation entirely.