About the Artist

César Gordillo was born in Mexico City in 1958. He has lived in Irapuato and San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, since 2010.

He studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and fine arts at the “La Esmeralda” School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving and at the School of Arts of the Universidad de las Américas Puebla.

He completed a Master’s degree in Cultural Heritage Research at the Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla, where he received a CONACULTA scholarship for his research on pigments and artistic materials, which funded an academic research stay in the Conservation Department of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain.

He is currently pursuing a doctorate in Art at the Universidad de Guanajuato, where he is developing his thesis “Poetics of Space: Indisciplinary Interactions between the Visual Arts and Architecture.”

He has painted in watercolor since 1980. He studied with the architects René Capdevielle and Vicente Mendiola, and with Maestro Alfredo Guati Rojo. He has also taken part in workshops with leading watercolorists such as Andy Evansen, Janine Gallizia, Pedro Cano, Vicente García Fuentes, Joseph Zbukvic, Marc Folly, Amit Kapoor, Álvaro Castagnet and Prafull Sawant, among others.

He has participated in group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, with the Sociedad Mexicana de Acuarelistas and IWS México, and has held solo exhibitions in Mexico City in 1999 and in Puebla in 2002.

He received the Tlacuilo Trophy in 1988 and 1989, awarded by the Sociedad Mexicana de Acuarelistas and the Museo Nacional de la Acuarela, and has twice received an Honorable Mention at the Salón Nacional de la Acuarela.

In 1998 he won the acquisition prize at the Color y Papel watercolor competition, sponsored by SUNCHEMICAL. In 2025 he won first prize in the Still Life category at the Ríos de Color Festival in Mexico City, and in 2026 he won first prize at the Montilla Watercolor Rally during the Córdoba Watercolor Festival in Spain.

He is currently a member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Acuarelistas and of IWS México/San Miguel de Allende and, since 2023, has been part of the organizing team of the IWS Plein Air Competition in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

His work has been published in The Art of Watercolour no. 55, edited and published in France, and belongs to the permanent collections of the Museo Nacional de la Acuarela, the Museo de la Acuarela del Estado de México, the Colección de Periódicos Síntesis of Puebla, and the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, USA.

His academic training supports and explains his current work and research on urban and natural landscape, as well as his personal exploration of the techniques and materials of traditional and contemporary watercolor.