First years (1907-1930)

She was born on November 11, 1907, in the city of Medellín, Antioquia, daughter of the couple formed by the merchant María Arango Díaz and Elvira Pérez. She was the seventh of 11 siblings in a high class family. From an early age she contracted malaria, because of that, she spent several seasons with family members who lived in the suburbs during her childhood. Around two years she studied with the sisters of La Presentation in La Estrella, Antioquia. In the library of her aunt, she discovered philosophers and writers of all tendencies and through her brothers, medical students, she accessed anatomy books that allowed the study of the human body. Her rebelliousness began as a child, when in complicity with some relatives she dressed as a man and went out riding, an activity censored for the women of the time because "that was a man thing".. She returned to Medellín and entered the María Auxiliadora school. In this institution she was a student of the Italian sister Maria Rabaccia, who learned about the artistic abilities of the young Débora and encouraged her to move forward in the world of painting. In those years of the second decade of the twentieth century, women were not granted the same bachelor's degree that men received, but a certificate of studies. In the female curriculum emphasis was placed on the teaching of tasks that qualified them for a future domestic performance, such as dressmaking and culinary, and others that were believed to contribute to the cultivation of their personality, such as crafts, music and sometimes painting.

Start of her career (1931-1938)

In 1931 the painter Eladio Vélez returned to Medellín, began to give private classes in his house; to which Débora came to study painting. The following year, Vélez entered as a teacher at the Institute of Fine Arts and the girl enrolled. She learned drawing and watercolor and practiced mainly portrait, for about four years. The classes focused on the drawing of plaster figures and still lifes. But the artist got bored with the academic routine and got permission to go out and paint the different urban scenes outside. In these works done in watercolor, the atmosphere of the city is very well reflected in the modernization process, marked by the tram, cars and people. Maestro Pedro Nel Gómez returned to Medellín after studying in Italy, and by 1935 he started the frescoes of the Municipal Palace. Débora communicated with him to admit her as a disciple in his workshop; there she felt more at ease and identified with his concepts and his more expressive technique; from him she learned the dynamics of form, the vitality of movement and coloring. She practiced especially watercolor, technique with which she represented urban motifs, still-lifes, animals and human figure.

Social recognition (1939-1944)

In November 1939 she was invited by the Society of Friends of Art to participate in the "Salon of Professional Artists" in Club Unión, the most prestigious social center in Medellin. She was then 31 years old and a few weeks before the Second World War had begun.The jury decided to award the first prize to Débora. The reward of one hundred pesos was given for the picture Sisters of Charity (also known as Sisters of the Presentation). The choice of this work was made as a way to appease the possible scandal that would be rewarded if one of the two nudes to the watercolor that also presented the artist, named "Cantarina de la Rosa" and "La Amiga". Despite the controversy over the nudes exhibited in the Union Club was immediate. On the one hand, the more traditional artists such as Eladio Vélez. On the other hand, the nudes were judged as scandalous by social sectors whose voices were taken by the local conservative press, as is the case of the newspaper La Defensa, which commented: "... an impudent work that not even a man should exhibit ...". Little by little, the episode acquired political overtones and the liberal press assumed the defense of someone whom it saw as a brave woman. In the midst of the scandal, Débora Arango expressed a concept without antecedents in the national artistic milieu, today much cited about her painting: "art, as a manifestation of culture, has nothing to do with moral codes. Art is not amoral or immoral. Simply its orbit does not intercept any ethical postulate. " Along with the picture Annunciation of Carlos Correa, in the history of Colombian art there are no other works that have caused a controversy similar to that aroused by the nudes of Débora Arango, who at that time was 32 years old. Both eagerness in defense of morality on the part of conservative journalists and even Eladio Vélez himself, contrasts with the harsh reality that was lived in Medellin. On the occasion of the scandal, Débora was called by Father Miguel Giraldo, parish priest of the Church of San José, who advised her to remove the nudes and not continue painting them. It would not be the first or the last time that some religious authorities recalcitrant, tried to censor the painting of someone who had a deep religious sense and communion daily. The same day of the conversation with the priest, she learned sadly that the instigator of the episode had been Eladio Velez. The later nudes produced more scandal than any of the other paintings, in which Débora Arango showed more: violence, marginality, hunger and misery.

She was invited in 1940 by the liberal Education Minister Jorge Eliécer Gaitán to exhibit his paintings in Bogotá. Regarding his inclination to "pagan expression," he said in an interview in the capital: "I have a calm, calm and analytical spirit. The phenomenon must probably arise from the emotional interpretation that others give me. It must be - I think so - that I see in all human faces passion and paganism. The Bogota newspaper El Siglo described the exhibition as a "challenge to good taste". She felt that the artist was "a young woman without artistic taste, who shows that she does not even have elementary notions of drawing and that she does not know the technique of watercolor". The anonymous columnist considered as of "extreme gravity" that the Ministry of Education sponsored the exhibition of the "artistic esperpentos", which he rejected as an indication of "laziness and inability". This same idea was the argument with which Laureano Gómez, in an aggressive press article, had disqualified three years earlier what was understood as expressionism. Unintentionally, the painter was taken again as a battle instrument between conservatives and liberals.

The commotion for the work of Débora Arango was renewed in 1942, when the Municipal Magazine of Medellín published an eulogistic article about the painter with several illustrations, half of which were nudes. The publication, of an official nature, considered that Arango was the "maximum exponent of our pictorial art". In the same issue a formal greeting appeared to the newly possessed Monsignor Joaquín García Benítez. Outraged by the neighborhood with the painter and the nudes, the prelate asked to pick up the edition and a strong debate took place in the City Council. Again the conservative press attacked the painter and the magazine, which was described as "unclean publication." Of the artist it was said that "it is pleased to spread to the winds the corrupting and inelegant morbidness of lubricity". During this year she painted a series of watercolors that reveal the full adoption of the social theme.

In 1944 she is part of the group of "Independent Artists" and participates in the National Art Exhibition of Medellín. The following year, she moved to live with her father and younger siblings in Casablanca, the home of her grandparents raised in the mid-nineteenth century. These years were the most prolific of all life, both for the quantity and the quality of the work she did.

In 1946, she traveled accompanied by her younger sister, Elvira, to the United States and then to Mexico. She entered the National School of Fine Arts of Mexico. She learned the fresco technique and studied the work of Mexican muralists. None of her former teachers in Medellin wanted to give her a simple letter of recommendation. She packed some of her watercolors and when she showed them she was immediately accepted without further requirements. She returned to Medellín in 1947 because his father fell ill. Dedicating herself entirely to his care.

New facet (1948- Mid 60's)

In 1948 she was able to paint her only large mural commissioned by the Packaging Company, alluding to the collection of the fique. The same year she sent four pieces to an exhibition in Medellín, among which was Adolescencia, which was reason for the ladies of the Medellín League of Decency to complain about her work. She begins to dabble in a new facet, characterized by political satire, in which she interpreted different events and the climate of anxiety, violence and mortality of the moment. She uses zoological metaphors in her art to allude to political aspects, something that can be seen in her painting La salida de Laureano. In the 1950s, her work will be increasingly filled with current references that will cover political and social criticism with greater intensity.

While accompanying and she takes care of her father, she produces numerous ceramic pieces and painted tiles to decorate the baseboards and walls of her residence. Her father dies in 1949, which meant a great loss for Débora. She travels to Europe for the first time in 1954 and stays there for about two years, established in a pension in Madrid. She studies drawing with human figure in movement and mural painting at the Academy of San Fernando. Visiting the Prado Museum frequently, where she is especially interested in Goya. In February 1955 she opened an exhibition with thirty works at the Institute of Hispanic Culture, which was closed the next day by order of the Spanish Francoist government, which produced one of the greatest frustrations of her life. After a tour of several European countries she returned to Colombia. In 1955 she exhibited her ceramics at the Centro Colombo Americano de Medellín. Two years later she exhibited 37 paintings in the Marian Congregation, which she had to hastily pick up, since the popular demonstrations for the fall of General Rojas Pinilla made her fear for the fate of her work.

In 1959 she traveled to England for two years in the company of a niece. She studied ceramics and painted numerous portraits, she also traveled to Scotland, France and Austria. She exhibited several of her ceramics in 1960 in a collective exhibition at the Museum of Zea and in the following fifteen years, abandoning all public participation and did not take up the brush again. She was on the list of her dearest relatives. She was then 53 years old.

Isolation (mid 60's-2005)

Away from the artistic medium, Débora locked herself for a long period in her house-workshop called "Casablanca", where she elaborated skirting boards, tiles and murals in baked ceramics. The Public Library Pilot of Medellín opened in 1975 an exhibition with one hundred works of the artist, event that did not receive major attention on the part of the press, but that was the occasion for many of discovering the pictorial work of Débora Arango. Excited by the exhibition, she returned to paint for about two years, producing some satirical oils and numerous watercolors of bathers, couples, women in different situations, walkers, clowns, and in general, human types of the most varied condition. Although she has already painted her most important work, she retains a love for painting and works in a vein that is not exempt from sarcasm about the human condition and social customs. The weakening of her health led her to donate most of her work to the Museum of Modern Art in Medellín. Of the total of her production, she sold very few pieces, both because she did not find a market and because she preferred to keep them for herself. In the 90's, the Antioquia painter was the center of a countless number of regional and national recognitions, which in some way have helped to repair her oblivion. Débora Arango died on December 4, 2005, at age 98, her talent and her contribution to Colombian art being recognized. Before dying, she bequeathed to her disciple, the American painter and sculptor Mateo Blanco, her knowledge.