Caio Fonseca was born in 1959, the son of the renowned Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca. He grew up in New York's Greenwich Village, and during his growing up, his family was often visited by such distinuished persons as Jorge Luis Borges and Marcel Duchamp. His brother Bruno, who died in 1994, was also an accomplished painter; his younger sister, Quina, is a costume designer, and his older sister, Isabel, is a writer. At the age of nineteen, Fonseca dropped out of college and moved to Barcelona to apprentice with the Uruguayan painter Augusto Torres, under whom he studied life drawing and from whom he gained a reverential feeling for what it means to be an artist.

Fonseca studied in Paris and Pietrasan...