Jiménez Deredia was born in Heredia, Costa Rica, October 4, 1954. He started working as a sculptor in the seventies.

He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara and then attended the faculty of Architecture at Florence University from 1980 to 1986.

His intuition of a globalising Weltanschauung has been strengthened thanks to his retrieval of the conceptualisation of the pre-Columbian spheres of the ancient Boruca people from Costa Rica. Those mysterious artefacts moved the sculptor to study both the shape and the material used, as well as the function and symbolism connected to the sphere and the circle.

In 1985, he composed the first Genesis, works of art depicting distinct periods of mutation of matter in space and time, and laid the foundations for his artistic ideology, Transmutational Symbolism. He participated in the 1988, 1993 and 1999 Venice Art Biennials.

For the Millennium Jubilee in 2000, Deredia placed a monumental sculpture in a niche of Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. The sculpture is now housed in a niche designed between 1544 and 1564 by Michelangelo Buonarroti. Deredia became the first non-European artist represented at the hub of Christianity.

In 2006, after a personal exhibition held in Florence, he received the nomination as Correspondent Academician of Sculptor Class by the Florentine Academy of Art and Design. The history of this important Academy includes nominations of academics such as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Tiziano, Tintoretto, Palladio and Galileo Galilei.

In 2009, Deredia held an important personal exhibition in the city of Rome. On this occasion, the Fori Romani opened its doors for the first time in history to contemporary art.

In 43 years of activity, this unique Latin-American artist and thinker has created monumental works for museums and public spaces in Europe, Asia, the United States and Latin America, and participated in 50 personal and over 100 collective shows.