Oswaldo Guayasamin (1919-1999) is one of the most important artists in Latin America, whose work has been exhibited in the most prominent halls in the world. His art has a deep indigenous feeling with an ideological and pictorial stance characteristic of the American continent: social realism..
Born in Quito and trained under the traditional canons of art, Guayasamín broke with those schemes to capture the reality of the indigenous peoples of Latin America who suffered oppression, as well as the attacks of the Colony and miscegenation..
With an expressionist style, the creations of this Ecuadorian artist were nourished by Mexican muralists in terms of expressiveness, the use of color and the force they transmit, to leave the observer the sensation of the vital energy of the author and, in this way, make your protest known.
In addition to that indigenous essence, his work is also characterized by appropriating avant-garde trends such as cubism and expressionism, without losing the realism of showing a reality of the violence that he denounced..
He made impressive exhibitions - more than 200 individual ones - in the most important museums in the world, such as in France, Spain, the former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Mexico, Chile and Argentina.
Guayasamín has also been known for befriending world-class figures, such as the poet Pablo Neruda, Fidel Castro, Gabriela Mistral, King Juan Carlos of Spain, Gabriel García Márquez and Carolina de Mónaco, among others whom he portrayed..
In 1991 the government of Ecuador recognized the prolific work of the artist and his contribution to world art, for which he decided to create the Guayasamín Foundation, to which the painter donated all his creation and his art collections..
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Oswaldo Guayasamín was born in Quito on July 6, 1919 and was the oldest brother in a family of ten. His father, José Miguel Guayasamín, was an indigenous person from the Quechua tribe; while her mother, who went by the name Dolores Calero, was mestizo.
From a very young age, he showed his love of painting by making caricatures of his classmates and by making posters for the store that his mother ran. In addition, he painted pictures on pieces of cardboard that he sold to tourists in order to pay for their studies..
Despite the firm opposition of his father, the young Guayasamín enrolled in the School of Fine Arts of Ecuador, from which he graduated as a painter and sculptor in 1941, also receiving the recognition of being the best student of his class.
Just one year after graduating, he managed to hold his first exhibition in the Ecuadorian capital. This exhibition was marked by its character of social denunciation, for which it caused a great stir among the attendees and the critics of the time.
With that particular style, the young Guayasamín managed to captivate Nelson Rockefeller, who bought him several paintings and supported him in his future..
After that controversial exhibition and with the support of Rockefeller, Guayasamín moved to the United States, where he also exhibited his paintings. During the 7 months of his stay, he visited all the museums that he could to come into direct contact with the work of El Greco, Goya, Velásquez and that of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Orozco..
With the money he managed to make, he traveled to Mexico to meet a great teacher, the muralist Orozco, who, impacted by his talent, allowed him to be his assistant. During this visit, he also met Diego Rivera and from both of them he learned the technique of painting al fresco. In Mexico he became friends with Pablo Neruda.
In 1945 he made a momentous journey: from Mexico to Patagonia. On this journey, he toured each city and each town to take notes and drawings of what was his first series of 103 paintings called Huacayñan, which in Quechua means "The Way of Crying", whose theme is about the black, the Indian and the mestizo.
In this way, all his work began to revolve around the indigenous theme, about the oppression and violence of which the indigenous peoples were victims..
The monumental work The way of crying It was made thanks to the support that the Casa de la Cultura gave Guayasamín.
This series was exhibited for the first time in Quito in 1952 at the Museo de Arte Colonial, and in the same year in Washington and Barcelona (Spain), during the III Bienal Hispanoamérica de Arte. In this last event he was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting.
In addition to having monumental exhibitions in the main museums of the world, Guayasamín's work is also present in large constructions.
For example, a Venetian glass mosaic mural has been in the Centro Simón Bolívar in Caracas since 1954, which is called Tribute to the American man.
For his native country he made two impressive murals in 1958. The first is The discovery of the Amazon river, also made in Venetian mosaic, which is in the Government Palace of Quito. The other was carried out for the Faculty of Law of the Central University of Ecuador that receives the name of History of man and culture.
In 1982 a mural of more than 120 meters that Guayasamín painted with marble dust and acrylics was inaugurated at the Barajas airport in Madrid. This monumental work has two parts: one is dedicated to Spain and the other to America.
His work is also present at the Unesco headquarters in Paris and in Sao Paulo. Its monuments also adorn Ecuador: To the young homeland is in Guayaquil and To resistance in Quito.
Thanks to his prolific work, his character of social denunciation and his universal significance, Guayasamín received numerous awards and recognitions for his career.
His work has been recognized throughout the world as a result of the fact that in 1957 he received the Best Painter in South America Award, which was awarded to him by the Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil. This marked the consolidation of its internationalization.
In 1976, together with his children, he created the Guayasamín Foundation to donate his artistic heritage to Ecuador. Through this foundation he was able to organize three museums: Pre-Columbian Art, Colonia Art and Contemporary Art..
He was appointed a member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Spain and an honorary member of the Academia de Artes de Italia. He was also named vice president and then president of the House of Culture of Quito in 1973.
Furthermore, he was the first Latin American artist to receive a decoration from the French government; this happened in 1974.
He died on March 10, 1999 without completing his greatest work., The chapel of man, which was conceived by the artist as a tribute to humanity, particularly to the Latin American people. It is an art museum built in Quito that aims to bring together Latin American art from Mexico to Patagonia.
The production of Guayasamín is marked from its beginnings by its deep indigenous spirit, and is loaded with a high content of social denunciation. In this way he was able to cross the borders of the traditional canons and become one of the most staunch defenders of the indigenous peoples of Latin America..
To develop his personal style, he drank from the influence of Mexican muralists, particularly his teacher Orozco. He was also a fervent exponent of expressionism, which gave all of his creation a humanistic edge by reflecting the pain and suffering suffered by a good part of humanity..
In this way, Guayasamín's work is part of that current of expressionism in which expressive reality matters more without dealing with external reality, but rather with the emotions that it arouses in the observer..
For this reason, this painter affirmed that “my painting is to hurt, to scratch and strike at people's hearts. To show what man does against man ”. This is particularly evident in their disfigured and sad faces that strongly convey the pain of their people..
In this sense, his work focuses on the human figure, with vibrant colors and social themes..
Despite adapting his work to the experiences and techniques that contact with great artists of the time left him, he always maintained the expression of human sentiment on his canvas. In all his creation, three ages can be differentiated, which are the following:
The Guayasamín Foundation has managed to collect some of the artist's first creations, who began painting and drawing at the age of 7. When he entered the School of Fine Arts at the age of 12, he captivated teachers and classmates with his virtuosity. Already at that age he began to work on the social theme that later marked his entire career.
What is considered as its first stage is what is called its first series: The path of crying.
This stage takes place between 1945 and 1952 and focuses mainly on the trip he made with his friends throughout South America, in which he stopped to visit each town to apprehend their reality..
Thanks to the notes and drawings he made during the journey, he bequeathed to the world Huacayñan, or The Way of Crying, his first series of 103 paintings in which he captures the problem of Indians, blacks and mestizos through universal archetypes that appear in settings with ancestral symbols, such as the moon, the sun and the mountains.
With all its universal symbolic load, this series was the one that gave it a place in the world arts.
In this stage that he developed during the 60s, Guayasamín demonstrated that the aesthetic content is not what is important in his work but the social content, the message of a man against oppression, violence and suffering.
The origin of this complaint goes back to when in his youth a childhood friend was assassinated by the repression in Quito. From there the artist undertook the crusade to portray the violence of man against man to leave a message of rebellion and fight against alienation..
This rebellion is evident in the eyes of his figures, who cry out for a change. Their figures have a grimace of pain despite the serenity they show, their hands cry out for hope. All this is reflected with huge vertical strokes to further mark the pain.
With this work, Guayasamín shook the world by exposing all the cruelty of man during the 20th century. This is why he managed to exhibit in the main western cities of the world, causing a stir both in critics and in the community..
This cycle began in the eighties as a tribute to his mother, a transcendental figure in his life, to whom he declared his love and gratitude for always supporting him..
This series marks a change in the artist's work without this meaning that the figures, now more serene than before, lose to any extent their message of denunciation and criticism..
The age of tenderness, or As long as I live I always remember you, It is made up of 100 works whose center is a tribute to his mother; in fact it refers in general to the mother figure including Mother Earth.
This ensemble is also considered a hymn to human rights. It is the last work that occupied him, from 1988 to 1999.
Due to his peculiar aesthetic style, but above all because of his theme focused on leaving a message of rebellion and denouncing humanity, Guayasamín managed with his art to cross the borders of his native Ecuador and occupy a place of honor in the universal arts.
This was so thanks to the fact that his creation has a particular expressiveness of the time he had to live, to transmit a message that awakened the conscience of humanity and managed to generate the cry of rebellion..
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