Juan Bastos

Over the past 30 years, Los Angeles-based artist, Juan F. Bastos, has executed several hundred portrait and landscape commissions in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. These oil paintings and pastel drawings hang in private homes, corporate offices, government buildings, embassies, libraries, churches, and universities.

Bastos' work is also represented in a number of public collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the City of Baltimore, the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington, the Inter-American Development Bank (Washington, D.C.), the Marlborough School (Los Angeles), the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging, Good Samaritan Hospital (Los Angeles), Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (Los Angeles), the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, Viterbi School of Engineering, Price School of Public Policy, and Gould School of Law, George Washington University, and Harvard University.

In private collections, Bastos is notably represented with commissioned portraits of high-profile art collectors Philip Niarchos, Eugenio Lopez, and Pamela Joyner.

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1958, Bastos and his family returned to Bolivia, their homeland, eleven years later. Surrounded by relatives who were paint...

After studying fine arts and architecture at the University of San Andres in La Paz, Bolivia, he came to the United States where he enrolled at Georgetown University in 1979. He later obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Cum Laude, and a Master of Fine Arts from Towson University.

Bastos has traveled extensively throughout Europe, South America, Central America, and the United States and, as a result, has exhibited widely. He has had one-man shows in Washington, D.C. (Interamerican Development Bank), Baltimore (Knight Gomez Gallery), Lima (Borkas Gallery), La Paz (Arte Unico), and a Los Angeles retrospective of his California portraits (Denenberg Fine Arts). In addition, he has been included in group shows in New York (Paula Cooper Gallery & The Park Avenue Armory), Paris (Gallerie Alias), Madrid (FAIM), Los Angeles (Denenberg Fine Arts), Essex, England (University of Essex), and a biennial in Cairo, Egypt. His works have been widely reviewed by the press. Bastos is often invited to give lectures and demonstrations at universities, colleges, and art institutions. He has also been featured in numerous television appearances throughout the Americas. Along with several other well-known artists, Bastos was profiled by The New York Times in a 1999 Sunday Style Section feature article about the reemergence of high-end portraiture.