Luis Paredes was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in 1966, he is the son of a Salvadoran mother
and a Mexican father. At a very young age, when the civil war broke out in El Salvador his family
emigrated to Guadalajara, Mexico, where he grew up and began his studies that he continued in
England until he was diagnosed with leukemia, a disease against which he has fought since then.
This experience will have a lot of influence on him and his work throughout the course of his
personal life and as an artist.
In 1984, after his first bone marrow transplant, he began his artistic training at the Instituto
Cultural Cabañas in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he received courses in drawing, painting and
photography. In 1986, due to health issues, he decided to continue his training on a self-taught
basis and returned to Central America to settle first in El Salvador and then in Guatemala, where
he began to document the region, at the same time he finished his first experimental series. In
1989 he moved to Denmark where he resides and works as a freelance artist and photography
teacher at the VERA School of Contemporary Art and Design, in Copenhagen.
Luis Paredes belongs to the generation of Central American photographers who began to
experiment with photography as a means of artistic expression, breaking with the documentary
format that predominated in the region until the end of the 1980’s. During more than thirty years of
his career as an artist, his work has been a long investigation of the photographic medium, always
renewing - sometimes radically - not only the subject matter but also his expressive language. He
has exhibited in galleries and museums in 33 countries, both individually and collectively, and has
participated in the 47th and 51st Venice Biennale, the 6th Havana Biennial, the 24th Sao Paulo
Biennial, the 1st Baltic Biennial and the 3rd Ibero-American Biennial of Lima, among others.
His work is represented in international collections, both private and public, including: the Center
for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Poland; the Casa de Las Américas, the Fototeca and the Centro
Wilfredo Lam in Havana, Cuba; the MARTE-Museum of Art of El Salvador; the MADC-Museum of
Contemporary Art and Design and Espacio Teorética in San José, Costa Rica; and the Centro
Fotográfico Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca, Mexico.