Paula Osorio

Paula Osorio (b. 1986) is a Colombian textile artist, born in Pereira and based in Bogotá. As a child she studied drawing and painting with private teachers while immersed in her family's sewing workshops, and later studied visual arts and fashion design. For many years her main work was fashion design, under her label Paula Osorio Tailored. Since 2022, by her own account, she has taken part in group exhibitions as an artist.

In her statement she calls hand embroidery and natural dyes the fundamental axes of her work, and says her research extends to a critique of mass production in the fashion industry, its environmental and cultural impact, and hyper-consumption. Her series Cadenas invisibles (Invisible chains), shown at the Feria del Millón in Bogotá in 2023, is made of square linen panels, 37.5 cm on a side, dyed with vegetables, fruits, grains and seasonings and hand-embroidered with figures drawn from statistics about the fashion industry. A later work in the series, 10% de las emisiones de CO2, is embroidered on linen dyed with achiote seeds; in presenting it she gives Earth.org as the source of its figure. In a second series, Mantras, phrases such as “tiempo al tiempo” are embroidered in calligraphy on naturally dyed linen and repeated until they become mantras.

From October to November 2023 La complicidad la llevamos puesta, a textile dyed with natural dyes and embroidered by hand, was shown in Presentes múltiples: El habitar como resistencia, one of two exhibitions closing the ARTBO | Tutor program, at ARTBO Salas in Bogotá. In 2024 Culto Gallery in Bogotá held an open studio with her and brought her work to the Affordable Art Fair in Stockholm. From September 2024 to March 2025 she showed La complicidad la llevamos puesta in Como las Venus de las Espumas, a group exhibition of women artists from Pereira at the Museo de Arte de Pereira. In November 2024 she showed Cadenas invisibles at FAMA (Feria de Arte Mexicano Accesible) in Monterrey. In November 2025 she represented Risaralda in the Salón Colombia Itaú at the 13th Feria del Millón in Bogotá, which gathered 33 artists, one from each of Colombia's departments and one from Bogotá, and her works there included pieces from Mantras.