Sergio Farfán

Sergio Farfán’s dizzyingly colorful cubistic-pop paintings and sculptures hold up a mirror to the human psyche, reflecting the angel and devil at war inside each one of us.

Sergio was seven years old when his family relocated from their native Peru some 3,600 miles north to Chicago, where a steady diet of ‘Looney Tunes’ and ‘Tom and Jerry’ animated classics offered refuge from the melancholy of his new life. When Sergio’s long-simmering mental health issues dramatically intensified, high school officials steered him towards art therapy, which utilizes creative expression as a means to address negative thoughts, emotions and behaviors. The impact was seismic, and during junior year Sergio claimed first-place honors in the 2013 Congressional Art Competition, traveling to Washington, D.C. to view his work on display inside the Capitol Building.

Sergio continued honing his physics-defying aesthetic ahead of his Vertical Gallery debut as part of our 2016 holiday-themed pop-up exhibit. We subsequently featured his canvases in our 2019 and 2020 anniversary group shows, and in late 2020, Vertical presented ‘Looking for Dreams in a Kan of Soup,’ a solo pop-up exploring Sergio’s debt to his boyhood hero Andy Warhol while simultaneously embracing a more playful, abstract approach that escaped Warhol’s shadow altogether — an approach explored further in 2021’s ‘Five Years.’

‘Anxiety Est. 03,’ which occupied gallery spaces in both Miami and Tampa, followed in 2022, Sergio returned with us South Florida as part of our Aqua Art Miami 2024 and 2025 all-star group rosters.