The exhibition runs until July 18 at the Duque Arango Gallery in Medellín. “I have painted for half a century as if I was screaming desperately. And my cry was added to all the other screams that express humiliation and anguish in the time in which we live ”, affirmed the Ecuadorian artist.
The Dolor y Esperanza exhibition presents 32 works by the Quito-born artist, Oswaldo Guayasamín (1919-1999), taking a tour through different moments of his artistic work. Pain and hope is on display at the Galería Duque Arango, in Medellín, until July 18.
The Ecuadorian’s artistic proposal included the work of different materialities such as painting, mural, sculpture, jewelry, drawing, graphic work and even architectural conceptions, in which, over six decades, he developed his figurative expressionism. as well as their social conscience.
“For the Duque Arango Gallery, the great masters of art through their works have exhorted us about the human condition at different times in history and Oswaldo Guayasamín is the most influential artist of Latin American art in the 20th century and today his work becomes current and contemporary in these new events in society, inviting us to reflect on pain and hope, the latter that we should not lose ”, says Miguel González, curator of Pain and Hope.
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Guayasamín’s work picked up the tradition of historical expressionism, from Picasso del Guernica, but he predominated the stakes that were emerging in Latin America since the beginning of the 20th century. The artist graduated from the Quito School of Fine Arts in painting and sculpture, and when he was 23 years old he held his first exhibition.
In the 1960s, Guayasamín painted series like “Mujeres llorando”, with faces of pain and funereal colors. In the series “El Grito”, “La Espera”, “Desesperados”, he proposed different compositions and representations of the human body. And in “As long as I live I always remember you”, she paid homage to motherhood by composing a space of compassion.
In the series “The Age of Wrath” he captured a political manifesto through plastic, expressing anger, tears, anguish, fear and the heads of a howling mountain. And in his set of works, González adds, there is “not only a deformed and caricatured physical world, but an allegory of moral violence, the realm of suffering, oppression, in tormented beings, premonitory of deterioration, orphanhood and death”.
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Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsPain and Hope collects a large part of his work, in which, in addition to expressionism and its representation in human figures, he also included still lifes and landscapes.
In 1976 the artist created the Guayasamín Foundation, in Quito, to which he offered his works and his collection, since he conceived art as a heritage of the peoples.
In 1999 he was awarded by UNESCO for “his entire life working for peace” and on March 10 of that year he died in Maryland, United States.
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