Caio Fonseca (b. 1959) is one of the most distinctive American abstract painters of his generation, whose refined visual language draws deeply from music, architecture, and the layered surfaces of Old World craftsmanship. Born in New York City, he was raised in an extraordinarily rich artistic environment. His father, the Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca, was a central figure in Latin American modernism and a former student of Joaquín Torres-García, and his siblings, the painter Bruno Fonseca and the writer Isabel Fonseca, share the family's deep engagement with the arts. This artistic inheritance shaped Fonseca's sensibility from the beginning, giving him an unusually cultivated view of what abstract painting could carry within it.

Fonseca pursued formal training at the New York Studio School before spending several formative years in Barcelona, where he studied intensively under Augusto Torres, the son of Joaquín Torres-García. These years in Spain deepened his engagement with the Constructivist tradition and gave him a personal connection to one of the great modernist lineages of twentieth-century art. He now divides his time between studios in New York and in Pietrasanta, the famous marble-carving town in Tuscany, where the long tradition of Italian craft remains part of his daily working environment.

Fonseca's paintings characteristically combine bold, silhouetted forms with atmospheric grounds worked through with incised lines, small floating shapes, and delicate graphic notation. Music, and particularly classical piano, of which Fonseca is a serious practitioner, informs the rhythm and structure of his compositions. His work has been exhibited in major galleries and museums internationally, and his paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and other leading institutions.