Jorge Eielson was born in Lima in 1924. Already as a child he had artistic tendencies. His mentor was José Maria Arguedas who was struck by his talent and introduced him, still very young, in the artistic circles of the capital.
In 1945, at the age of twenty-one, Eielson wins the National Award for Theather. In these years his first canvases show the evident influence of two very important artists: Klee and Mirò. In 1948 he has his first exhibition. In the same year he obtains a scholarship from the French government and he moves to Paris where he was first put into contact with the abstract art and where he then became befriended with some artist of the New Realism, guided by Pierre Restany.
He received a second scholarship from Unesco, for his journalism, and he moves to Switzerland where he personally meets Max Bill, and artist that he personally admires. In 1951 he decided to definitely move to Italy where he then meets Michele Mulas, a young artist from Sardinia that from that moment on has been his life partner until his death.
In 1959 he abandons the extreme avant-garde and adapts heterogeneous materials, however natural, such as soils, sands, clays, animal faeces, metal dust and marble, other then concrete, with whom he literally sculpts the surface of his painting.
Starting at the Biennale of Venice in 1964 where he exhibited his first ‘knots', Eielson obtains prestigious international acknowledgements that made him participate then to large exhibitions in museums such as the MOMA in New York or at the Nelson Rockefeller collection in the same city, receiving over and over again invitations to the Salon de Mai and Comparaisons in Paris and showing his works in private galleries in Europe and America.
In 1967 he is an often visitor of the Chelsea Hotel in New York where he meets major American artists of the pop art and of the beginning conceptual art. In 1969 he was invited to the historical exhibition “Plans and projects as art” at the Kunsthalle in Zurich and in this same period his interest grows for his performance and installations.
In 1978 he is granted the Guggenheim Fellowship for literature in New York and in 1979 he exhibits in the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.
At the literature level, Eielson is considered as one of the greatest poets of the Spanish language. His art works are present in some of the major public and private collection such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York (USA), the Museo de Bellasortes di Caracas (Venezuela), the Museo de Arte of Lima (Peru), Taideteollisuusmuseo of Helsinki (Finland), National Trust for Historical Preservation of Washington (USA), Collection Pompidou, David de Rotschild, Fustenberg, Montague of Paris, Nelson Rockfeller di New York, Roy Lichtenstein, Vernar Venet of New York, G. Costa in Genoa, Barbara Dunca, Paul Newman of New York.
He died on March 8th, 2006.