About the author

Albeiro Mazo Mazo picked up his first tools as a carpenter long before he ever thought of himself as an artist. Born and raised in Medellín, he spent decades working wood the way his craft demanded: measuring, cutting, joining, sanding, building furniture and structures meant to last. It was steady, disciplined work, the kind that teaches a person to read grain and know exactly how much a material can bend before it breaks.

Then came 2020. With workshops closed and the city slowed to a stop, Albeiro found himself surrounded by something every carpenter accumulates without noticing: offcuts, remnants, the pieces too small or too irregular to use in a commission but too good to throw away. What started as a way to pass the time during lockdown became something else entirely. He began arranging those leftover pieces not as building material but as form and color and composition. A discarded plank became a face. A pile of scraps became a landscape. For the first time in his career, Albeiro was not building something to spec. He was building something that came from him.

That shift is the seed of what he now calls "arte circular", or circular art. It is not a slogan he adopted after the fact. It is simply how he works. Every piece Albeiro makes begins with a material that already had one life: wood pulled from a other projects, metal that used to be something else, fabric that was cut for another purpose and never used. Rather than treating these as scraps to be hidden or disguised, he treats them as collaborators. The history in the material, the nicks, the stains, the wear, becomes part of the final piece instead of something to sand away. For Albeiro, giving a material a second life is not just an environmental choice, though it is that too. It is a way of arguing that nothing is finished being useful just because its first purpose has ended, whether that applies to a piece of wood or to a craftsman deciding, well into his career, to become an artist.

That philosophy grew from a personal practice into a public one. As Albeiro kept making and showing his work, other artists in Medellín who shared a similar instinct, toward reuse, reinvention, and material honesty, began to gather around him. What began as a personal studio eventually became Mazo Gallery, now located in Local 452 inside the Palacio Nacional, in the heart of downtown Medellín. The Palacio itself, a building with its own long history of adaptation and reuse, feels like a fitting home for a gallery built on exactly that idea.

Today, Mazo Gallery holds both worlds under one roof. Visitors will find Albeiro's own work, pieces built from reclaimed wood and salvaged materials that carry the fingerprints of their previous lives, alongside a curated selection of other local and regional artists who work in a similar spirit. Some paint. Some sculpt. Some build. All of them, in one way or another, are interested in what happens when something old is looked at again with new eyes.

Mazo Gallery is not trying to be a museum piece frozen behind glass. It is a working gallery in a working part of the city, open to anyone curious enough to walk in off the street and see what a carpenter's hands can do when they stop building to order and start building to say something. Come see the wood remember what it used to be.