Biography
Arturo Laime is a Berlin-based visual artist working across painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation. Born in Lima, Peru in 1975, his practice has been shaped by decades of movement between continents, ecosystems, and communities — from the Peruvian Amazon to the German Black Forest — and by a sustained commitment to art as a form of social and ecological attention.
Laime studied Geography and Environmental Engineering at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima before turning fully to the visual arts, training at the Sachs Visual Arts School under Pancho Guerra-García, Haroldo Higa, and Ignacio Macha. This dual formation runs quietly through his work: an attention to terrain, to living systems, and to the communities that inhabit them.
Between 2006 and 2012, he founded and directed Amazon Action, a grassroots organisation based deep in the Peruvian Amazon, 140 kilometres from Iquitos. Working from the Yanayacu Lodge on the edge of the rainforest, the initiative ran community health programmes, environmental projects, a popular kitchen for families on the outskirts of Iquitos, and a wildlife rescue facility for primates. Living in direct contact with Indigenous and riverside communities — with the forest itself as both subject and daily reality — this period became the ethical and imaginative core from which much of his work continues to grow.
After a flood destroyed the lodge in 2012, Laime relocated to Germany. He established a studio in Frankfurt am Main, where he built a new body of work while collaborating with Ausstellungsraum Eulengasse — of which he remains an active member — and Kunstverein Familie Montez, among other spaces. Notable exhibitions from this period include the duo show “Die Empathie der Dinge” with Wolfgang Hermann at Eulengasse in 2023, and “Ritual: Glaube und Überwindung” at the same space in January 2025. His solo exhibition “Naturaleza en erupción” in Lima and the large-scale public art project “Dinosaurios del Perú” at Miraflores Central Park marked the close of his Peruvian chapter. In Germany his exhibition activity expanded steadily, including solo shows at Museum Arbeit am Rhein in Elchesheim-Illingen and group presentations in Frankfurt, Munich, Athens, and Thessaloniki.
In 2020 he moved to Gernsbach in the northern Black Forest, a period that began under pandemic conditions and became one of concentrated production and unexpected rootedness. Confined largely to the studio during the first years, he developed new bodies of work that drew directly from the forest landscape surrounding him — its textures, its silences, its distance from everything urban. Exhibitions from this period include “Die Beständigkeit der Hoffnung” and the online solo show “New Horizons”, produced during the height of the pandemic, followed by “Verborgene Schätze: Der Schwarzwald mit lateinamerikanischen Augen” at the Altes Rathaus Iselin in Gernsbach — a title that captures precisely what this period meant: a Latin American eye turned toward a deeply German landscape, finding in it something both foreign and familiar.
Laime arrived in Berlin in 2025 — a move he describes as a return, to the scale and plurality of a capital city, with Lima as its distant echo. He intends to build lasting collaborative relationships here with cultural institutions, NGOs, and organisations working across art, social justice, democracy, and environmental protection. He is currently active in Berlin’s professional art circuit and is open to exhibition proposals, institutional collaborations, and residencies.
His paintings, predominantly in oil, move between figuration and expressionism. Recurring presences include the human figure, fire as both destruction and renewal, and the experience of living always at some distance from where one began. Alongside canvas and panel, he works with materials that carry their own histories: bark cloth from the Amazonian rainforest, reclaimed wood, sack paper. These are not decorative choices. They are continuations of a practice that has always understood art as a form of ethical attention.
