Javier Tapia was born in 1957 in Lima, Peru, and grew up in a period of upheaval when guerrilla warfare dominated political and social movements across the country.

He moved to the United States in the 1980s, witnessing various phases of humanity: good and evil, intellectual and primitive, connected and separate.

Tapia takes these studio themes as abstract shapes and broad strokes to serve as a metaphor for chaos and control, or structure and disorder.

In the tradition of the Peruvian Textile, he overlaps, subtracts, and reworks the watercolors, flipping the paper out as bold colors emerge like carvings.

[3] In 2015, Tapia worked as an associate professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Typography at Virginia Commonwealth University.