Oswaldo Guayasamín

OSWALDO GUAYASAMÍN (Quito, Ecuador, 1919 - Baltimore, U.S.A., 1999).
"Anguish".
Ink on paper.
Presents on the back label of the gallery Lassaletta (Barcelona).
Signed in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 40 x 30 cm; 57 x 46 cm (frame).
One of the greatest names in Ecuadorian painting, Oswaldo Guayasamín showed artistic gifts already in childhood, and even sold some paintings in the Plaza de la Independencia in his native Quito in his early years. Despite his father's opposition, he entered the School of Fine Arts in the Ecuadorian capital to study painting and sculpture, in the midst of the so-called Four Days War, a civic-military uprising against the government in the course of which his great friend Manjares died. This event, which would later inspire his work "Los niños muertos" (The Dead Children), would forever mark his vision of human beings and society. In 1941 he obtained the title and the First Prize at the Mariano Aguilera Salon in Quito, and the following year he held his first solo exhibition, at the age of twenty-three. This exhibition will be controversial, and considered by critics as a confrontation with the official exhibition of the School of Fine Arts. However, the American magnate Nelson Rockefeller, impressed by his work, buys several of his paintings, initiating a relationship that will continue in the future. Between the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943 Guayasamín is in the United States, and later travels to Mexico, where he begins to work as an assistant to Orozco. He would later make a series of trips through Latin America, always finding the same situation of oppression of the indigenous society, to which he himself belonged. From then on, this will be a constant theme in his work. Around this time he will focus especially on social themes, and will begin to simplify the forms, finally arriving at his personal emphatic and expressive style. His work, centered on the human being and described by critics as expressionist, reflects the pain and misery that plague society, and at the same time denounces the violence that dominated the monstrous twentieth century, marked by wars, genocides, dictatorships and tortures. In these years of youth Guayasamín obtained all the National Prizes in his country, and at the age of thirty-six he won the Grand Prize at the III Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte, held in 1955 in Barcelona. Later he also won the same award at the São Paulo Biennial (1957). Throughout his career, this master exhibited his work individually not only in various Latin American countries, but also in many European countries, the Soviet Union, China and the United States. Besides easel painting, he painted murals, sculptures and monuments, today present in Quito (monument "To the Resistance", murals in the Government and Legislative Palaces, the Central University and the Provincial Council), Madrid (Barajas Airport), Paris (UNESCO Headquarters), Sao Paulo (Latin American Parliament), Caracas (Simon Bolivar Center), Guayaquil ("To the Young Homeland"). In 1971 Guayasamín is appointed president of the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, and five years later the Guayasamín Foundation is created in Quito, to which he donates his work and art collections, since he conceives all artistic expression as a patrimony of the people. In 1978 he was appointed member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid.