|
(b. Loja, Ecuador, 1913; d. Quito, Ecuador, 1997). This Ecuadorian painter and teacher studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Quito. In 1940 he returned home to Ecuador and founded the Caspicara Art Gallery, a center for progressive art. In 1945 he helped found the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana in Quito and was actively involved in its promotion of Ecuadorian art. He was also appointed director of the Museo Nacional de Arte Colonial in Quito in 1948. His work was in a figurative, social realist style, and he portrayed people oppressed by exploitation and misery, attacking the traditional aesthetic of the academies and schools that came to dominate artistic taste in Ecuador in the late 19th century and early 20th. He was influenced by Mexican mural painting, admiring its qualities of denunciation and tenderness and its colour. His best known work is Camillas (1941; Quito, Museo de Arte Moderna), in which he vigorously expressed the pain of the indigenous people, who carry hea
|
