Jorge Jiménez Martínez, in art Deredia, was born in Heredia, Costa Rica, on 4 October 1954. He began his work as a sculptor in the 1970s, creating works in which there are already evident motifs and suggestions that will be constant in his next work: the development of organic forms modified by the environment, the force of gravity and the influence of pre-Columbian art. At the age of twenty-two, in 1976, he settled in Italy, where he had conducted a scholarship, and from here he began to travel to Europe, thus coming into contact with the main artistic movements of the continent.
He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara and, from 1980 to 1986, attended the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Florence. The intellectual stimuli of those years profoundly change his approach to art: immersed in the Florentine climate, Deredia deepens its interest in the Renaissance period. The intellectual fervor of that period prompts him to reflect intensely on the developments of his work. The intuition of a globalizing dimension of being and the universe, at the basis of his vision of life, develops and deepens thanks to a conscious return to the sources of his country’s culture. The extraordinary creative suggestion received from the observation of the monumental granite spheres produced by the pre-Columbian civilization of the Boruca, found in the rainforests of Costa Rica and now partly preserved in the museum of San José, begins to be reflected in his work. Those artifacts of mysterious primordial force move the sculptor towards studies that concern as much form and matter as functions and symbols derived from the sphere and the circle. The adoption of the art name "Deredia (Contraction of "de Heredia", or "from Heredia") underlines, in these years, the artist's conscious return to the origins of his culture as a source of creative and philosophical inspiration.
