José Antonio Suárez Londoño for Nine Orchard

About

José Antonio Suárez Londoño was born in Medellín, Colombia in 1955. He studied biology at the Universidad de Antioquia in the late 1970s. It was at this time that he began his artistic practice, producing drawings of assorted subjects—like portraits, animalia and botanicals.

His work became a visual diary of his interests and usual movements, reflecting his previous training in the sciences and adolescent obsession with the illustrated Larousse encyclopedic dictionary.

His work resides in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Banco de la República, Colombia; and the Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, among other major institutions.

Learn More

The Work

It was destiny, perhaps, that José Antonio Sáurez Londoño was asked to make a poker deck for Nine Orchard:

“When I got the commission, the first concern was the J, Q and K! It’s so difficult to imagine these characters without falling into cliché! And when told that I can do whatever I want, it was like an explosion of creativity in my head. So I began to play a multitude of mind games with people, animals and things, interacting in nonsense activities, and what you have in your hands is the result of those games—and the dream came true, one I have had since i was a teenager, to draw a deck of cards.”