Jacob Karpio began working as an art dealer as early as 1982. He opened his first gallery in Quito, Ecuador and another exhibition space in Panama City shortly thereafter. Both locations proved, however, to be too uncertain for a young gallery without a well-established network of collectors and patrons. Karpio therefore had no choise but to close both spaces, and seek a more suitable location. Two years later he moved to San José, the capital of his native country Costa Rica, where he found a lasting, solid base for his business plans.

In tne mind 1980s the political situation was very unstable throughout Central America, and regional economic problems were extreme. Only Costa Rica seemed to be spared from his precarius situation of political, economic and social uncertainty, while armed conflicts and guerrilla warfare were the order of the day for its neighbouring states. Karpio didn't let himself be put off by the region's serious problems and unsafe conditions, and concentrated on his new exhibition space. The gallery opened its doors to the public in Cuesta de Nuñez, in 1988, in with a exhibition by the Argentinian Guillermo Kuitca, one of the most celebrated Latin American artists of the 1980s.

Since that time, the Jacob Karpio Gallería is the only Central American Gallery over the past two decades to have worked at the international level, promoting and disseminating Latin American art woldwide with great dedication. Its special location not only made it possible for the gallery to operated throughout Central America, but also allowed it to develop into a hub that connets the contemporary art scenes of North and South America and forms a link with the Caribbean Islands. In fact, the Caribbean became one of the gallery's preferred fields of activity, and Puerto Rico in particular increasingly become one of the major markets for contemporary Latin American art in this region.

With its unusual geographical location, the gallery clearly called into question the fixed boundaries between the art world's so-called centre and its periphery. Karpio understood early one that the idea expressed in the dichotomy of 'centre and periphery' had begun to break down and would becoming increasingly irrelevant in a world of expanding migration, growing nomadism, modern information technology, mass media, global economic interest and the internationally orientated cultural industry.

When more and more prosperous Latin Americans searching for a free and politically stable country during the 1980's chose to live in Costa Rica, Karpio took advantege of these cincumstances, and his gallery won many new customers. The internet made it easier for the gallery to work with artists living outside of the country and simplified its contact with collectors and galleries located worldwide. One effect of the economy's gloabalization was an increasing number of art fairs around the world, and these became a further important instrument for avoiding the danger of being left to struggle in an otherwise only poorly developed local art market. Over the past twenty years the gallery has repeatedly taken part in various art fairs, and thus given its artists a chance to make names for themselves on the international art scene. However, Karpio has also been the driving force in Costa Rica and in Venezuela in the production of ground-breaking exhibitions.

These have included, for example, 'Paradigma 80's-90s' in 1989, 'Mesótica" (in cooperation with Virginia Pérez-Ratton and Carlos Bazualdo) in 1995, as well as 'Trasatlántica: The America-Europa Non Representativa' (together with Ruth Auerbach) in 1995, which showed works by Vik Muniz, Adres Serrano, Win Delvoye, Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, Lydia Dona, Helmut Dorner and David Reed, among others.

Over the past few years the gallery has promoted and presented works by some of Latin American's most famous artists, incluinding Fabián Marcaccio, Kcho, Guillermo Kuitca, José Antonio Hernández-Diez and Francis Alÿs. But Karpio has also introduced younger Latin American artists to the public, such as Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla from Puerto Rico, and Federico Herrero, Cinthya Soto and Priscilla Monge from Costa Rica, all of whom can be counted among the most outstanding young talents form Central America and the Caribbean. Moreover, he has cultivated lasting relationships with museums and public collections in both parts of the Americas and in Europe, and contributed greatly to Latin American art being exhibited in the most important art collections in international museums.

After Karpio had operated his gallery outside the city centre for a while, he moved it back to its original address in Cuestas de Nuñez in 2001, in the middle of the old section of San José. In 2004 Jacob Karpio, together with the gallerist Silvana Facchini, opened a new gallery in the Wynwood Art District of Miami under the name Karpio + Facchini Gallery. Installations by Dario Escobar and Guillermo Conte have already been shown there, as well as the exhibition '8 WP' at the begining of 2005, which included works by the painters Lydia Dona, Kika Karadi, Valentina Liernur, Ana Elena Garúz, Isabel Rubio, Ivelisse Jiménez, Clemencia Labin and Heide Trepanier.

Jens Hoffman