Antonio Máro was born Apolo Ramírez Zapata in Catacaos, Piura, northern Peru in 1928. Attracted by art at a young age, he began painting as a child. His first official teacher was Ricardo Grau (1907–1970), a Belgian expressionist painter and then director of the Lima Art Academy. Despite showing promise, the young Máro set aside art for a medical degree he would complete in Germany in 1950. A qualified gynaecologist, he continued to paint in his free time and eventually enrolled at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart under Willi Baumeister. In the late 1960s, he finally gave up on the medical profession to dedicate himself exclusively to art, adopting the artistic name of Antonio Máro.
The roots of Máro’s work lie in the pre-Columbian art and culture of his native Peru, a cultural legacy he combines with European culture. In addition to painting, he also devotes himself to the production of etchings and lithographs as well as sculptures made from wood, stainless steel, bronze, ceramics and glass. Rather than spirituality, it is sensuality and contact with nature that have left their mark on chromatic collages while superimposed, a technique marked by a very strong relationship with the material. From 1980 onwards, Máro abandoned the intertwining of shapes reminiscent of Eduardo Chillida and concentrated his work on tectonic layers. It is the principle of the sensuality of the material, and not the symbolism of colours, that the chromatic registers of these experimental and unruly works obey.
Máro broke onto the international scene definitively in the 1980s with his own pavilion at the São Paulo Biennale and the Venice Biennale. Further invitations to major national and international solo and group exhibitions at renowned galleries and museums followed, including in Vienna (1996), Beijing and Jakarta (1998), New York and Washington DC (1990, 1996 and 1999), Luxembourg (2001), and several Latin American countries. Between 2015 and 2017, aged almost 90, Máro received a major commission to paint a picture for every room and every floor of the Fontenay Hotel in Hamburg, totalling several hundred individual works.
Máro has lived and worked in Hauset, Belgium, since 1981.
