María Berrío

María Berrío was born in 1982 in Bogotá, Colombia. She moved to New York at eighteen to study at Parsons School of Design, completing her BFA there in 2004, and went on to earn an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2007. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Berrío builds her compositions from layers of collaged Japanese paper worked over with watercolor and other media, constructing dense, theatrical scenes that draw on folklore, migration, and the experience of women and children navigating adversity and displacement. Early support came through New York studio and fellowship programs, including the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program, and Smack Mellon, and she received a NYFA Fellowship in Painting in 2018. She received the amfAR Award of Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS in 2023. She is represented by Hauser and Wirth and by her longstanding London gallery, Victoria Miro.

Berrío's institutional trajectory has been fast and broad. A major museum survey, The Children's Crusade, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2023, following an earlier solo presentation at the Norton Museum of Art in 2021, and her work has since been included in group exhibitions including the Nasher Museum of Art's Spirit in the Land. Curators and institutions have consistently framed her collages as narrative rather than purely decorative, reading the recurring women, children, and animals as figures of resilience against upheaval, migration, and loss. A major museum survey, María Berrío: Songlines, is set to open at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in September 2026, a further sign of sustained museum interest in her work.

Berrío's auction market is young but has moved quickly. Her recorded auction high is He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (2015), which sold for USD 1.6 million at Phillips in New York on 18 May 2022, more than three times its low estimate and a record for the artist at auction. Her second strongest recorded result is La Cena, which sold for USD 1.5 million at Phillips in New York on 29 April 2026. Reporting from Artnet has put her combined auction turnover at roughly USD 11.8 million for 2022, a figure driven by a small number of high value lots rather than a deep, repeated trading history.

Berrío's market is still developing, with a small number of headline auction results rather than a long, densely traded history, so any single sale can move the picture more than it would for a more established name. Her 2020s move into representation by Hauser and Wirth, alongside her existing relationship with Victoria Miro, is one of the strongest available signals of continued institutional and market support. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through her representing galleries matter more than usual when evaluating a specific work.