Three generations.
One unbroken line.
Total conviction.

Guillo Pérez 3 is a Dominican-American painter born in Santo Domingo and raised in Queens, New York. He is the grandson of Maestro Guillo Pérez, one of the Dominican Republic's most respected painters and a recognized figure in the U.S. State Department's Art in Embassies program. He is the son of master painter Willy Pérez. Three generations of unbroken serious painterly practice, each one building on the last.

Before any of that lineage became a gallery, it became a career that moved through some of the most demanding rooms in American art and design. Trained at Wood Tobé-Coburn in New York and at the Escuela Taller Guillo Pérez, the school his own grandfather founded, he studied under master painter Vidal Suárez, art historian Laura Gil, design mentor George Gaw, master retoucher Bob Serpe, and technical instructor Miguel Simott. He spent years inside Chelsea's gallery system, co-founded Artist Revolution Studios and ESP Gallery, exhibited at Amsterdam Whitney, and presented work at Art Basel Miami Beach. In Tampa, he was mentored by the late Theo Wujcik, a Tampa Museum of Art artist in his own right. Today his work hangs in the permanent collection of the Skylands Museum of Art alongside Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, and is held by private collectors in over 48 countries. And that is before we even get to the photograph of Marilyn Monroe.

He grew up in a deeply religious Christian household and has spent a lifetime in serious study of world history, comparative religion, and international affairs. His paintings are not decorative mythologies. They are the work of a man who has read the texts, lived the contradictions, and paints from the inside of those traditions. When he paints Atabey, the Taino supreme goddess, he is reaching back to the ancestral roots that preceded his Christian formation. When he paints Gilgamesh, he is painting a hero from a civilization that was asking the same questions about mortality and meaning a thousand years before the Bible was written.

When he paints, that is when he is seeing.

"I was born and I am a product of art. It's my vehicle to connect me to humanity."

Guillo Pérez 3

"Marcolina's isn't just a gallery. It's a place where people remember who they are."

Guillo Pérez 3

The hands that touched
The Last Sitting.

In 1962, photographer Bert Stern spent three days shooting Marilyn Monroe in a hotel suite at the Bel-Air. It would become known as The Last Sitting, the final photographs ever taken of her, six weeks before her death. The images are among the most reproduced and studied in the history of photography.

Decades later, working as a photo retoucher at Duggal in New York, Guillo Pérez 3 was given those negatives. Before he was known as a painter, before Tampa, before Marcolina's, his hands were on some of the most scrutinized images ever made. The precision that work demanded, the understanding that every pixel carries weight, that nothing is too small to matter, never left him.

It is the kind of detail that sounds almost too remarkable to be true. It is true. And it is one small part of a career that, by the time Guillo arrived in Tampa, had already touched campaigns for National Geographic, Victoria's Secret, Roberto Dutesco, and Tommy Hilfiger.

The Straz Center
called him art royalty.

In 2022, Guillo Pérez 3 was commissioned to create a mural for The Straz Center, Tampa's premier performing arts venue, in connection with their production of The Little Match Girl. During an interview about the project, the team at the Straz described him simply as art royalty.

It is the kind of description that tends to follow Guillo without him asking for it. Three generations of painters, a career that has touched Chelsea, Art Basel, and the Tampa Museum of Art's circle, and now Tampa's own performing arts institution, all arriving at the same conclusion in their own words.

"Art royalty."

From an interview during the mural commission for The Little Match Girl, 2022

Apollo is a Greek god.
He is also a rooster.
He is also a grandfather.

In Greek mythology, the rooster is one of Apollo's sacred animals: the herald of dawn, the creature that announces light over darkness every morning. Apollo the god of light and the rooster that heralds it are the same figure in different registers.

Maestro Guillo Pérez raised roosters. He kept them as companions in his studio, painted them, honored them. The studio where Guillo Pérez 3 took his first steps was alive with those birds. The rooster was the first image of the world he knew. It was where he learned, without words, what it meant to be an artist.

When Guillo paints Apollo as a rooster, he is honoring the Greek god of light and creativity. He is honoring the Caribbean tradition where the rooster announces a new day. And he is placing his grandfather at the center of a painting nominally about an ancient god. The grandfather becomes Apollo. The studio becomes the temple. The rooster becomes the through-line connecting three generations of serious painterly practice.

Bauhaus
Budō.

Budō means the battle-hardened way. Guillo Pérez 3 has spent nearly half his life forging his version of it: a discipline built through close study with master painter Vidal Suárez, art historian Laura Gil, design mentor George Gaw, master retoucher Bob Serpe, and technical training with Miguel Simott. Beginning in 2009, years of work alongside the Emory family, Peter Botti, and mentor Theo Wujcik, along with Paul Tabio and Rina Cavicci, sharpened the method further.

The Bauhaus dimension comes from its founding ambition: the total artwork. Not a painting as an isolated object, but art as the organizing principle of an entire life and the spaces that life touches. Guillo has carried this forward by founding community sanctuaries for arts education throughout his life: spaces that fuse history, performance, green solutions, leadership training, community building, caretaking, design, healing, martial arts, literature, music, and photography into a single living practice.

This is the same impulse that shapes Marcolina's today. Figure drawing, Monday night art classes, gatherings that bring people together around the work. It is not a new direction. It is the same total artwork philosophy he has practiced his entire life, now built into the gallery itself.

On the canvas, this discipline becomes total conviction. The practitioner who has trained for decades does not think about technique when they move. The technique has become the body. Every mark Guillo makes comes from that place: not calculated but committed, not tentative but complete. Guillo sets out to aggressively construct fine art from the totality of the varied fragments of his life. Bauhaus Budō is the name for the discipline that makes that possible.

Recognized by the New York Times as a Star Maker: an artist whose influence extends beyond his own practice to shape the work of those around him.

Maestro Guillo Pérez, grandfather of the artist, is a recognized figure in the U.S. State Department's Art in Embassies program. One of the Dominican Republic's most respected painters and a foundation of the three-generation lineage.

A work by Guillo Pérez 3 is held in the permanent collection of the Skylands Museum of Art in Lafayette, New Jersey, alongside Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, and Michael Parkes. The museum is dedicated to imaginative and mythological art, the same territory Guillo has spent his career exploring.

The Cage Brewing Octopus mural, painted by Guillo Pérez 3 in collaboration with Blake Emory, was featured by Creative Loafing Tampa Bay as one of the city's must-see works of public art. In 2022 he was commissioned by The Straz Center for a mural connected to their production of The Little Match Girl.

Marcolina's Fine Arts Gallery, represented by Guillo Pérez 3 as its defining artistic voice, recognized as Tampa's leading contemporary fine art gallery by ThreeBestRated.com 2026.

Marcolina's Fine Arts Gallery named a Philanthropists of the Year Finalist by Tampa Bay Business and Wealth Magazine 2025, the only Ybor City honoree, recognizing Guillo's years of community work using art as therapy for youth and veterans.

Work presented at Art Basel Miami Beach: the most significant art fair in the Western hemisphere and the defining platform of the international contemporary art market. One of the most selective and consequential presentations an artist can achieve.

Co-founded ESP Gallery Chelsea 2012 to 2020 with fellow Marcolina's artist Blake Emory. Solo exhibition Quantum Navigator at ESP in 2019. Two exhibitions at Amsterdam Whitney Gallery Chelsea in 2015 and 2018. Nearly a decade of sustained presence in the world's most concentrated gallery district.