Oswaldo Guayasamín

OSWALDO GUAYASAMÍN (Quito, Ecuador, 1919 - Baltimore, USA, 1999).
"Portrait of Dinah de Grandi".
Oil on canvas.
Signed, dedicated and dated in the lower left corner.
Presents bands of reinforcement.
Measurements: 117 x 80 cm; 121 x 84 cm (frame).

This work belongs to one of the series of portraits that Guayasamín developed throughout his life, where the face is the absolute center of the composition. In these portraits, the artist usually exaggerates those physical features that stand out to communicate an emotion, a pain or a silent dignity: large, melancholic eyes, with a steely patina; elongated, spiritualized ovals. The chromatic palette is highly contrasted, between the intense red of the background, the auburn highlights of the hair, and the light skin of an off-white tone. The colors are applied flatly, and tend to expressive simplification, less is more. The shadows of the face are colored (bluish or green), in the fauve manner. Guayasamín does not work from traditional realism, but from an emotional identification with the subject. His portraits, whether anonymous indigenous people, public figures or close people, are treated as symbols of universal human pain. In this sense, even individual faces are transformed into archetypes: the strength of mothers, the resilience of the elderly, and so on. Here we are before a young woman whose large eyes seem to look inward. The face has been delineated with delicacy and decision. She has slight dark circles under her eyes, prominent cheekbones and closed lips in a restrained gesture. The expressive force is above all in the look charged with gravity, in the intense colors that surround the figure, and in the emotional silence that emanates from the frame.

One of the greatest names in Ecuadorian painting, Oswaldo Guayasamín demonstrated his artistic talents 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. In 1941 he obtained the title and 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. 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. 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 of the III Bienal Hispanoamericana de Arte, celebrated 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. In addition to his easel paintings, he painted murals, sculptures and monuments, now present in Latin America and Europe. In 1971 Guayasamín was named president of the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, in 1978 a member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, and a year later an honorary member of the Italian Academy of Arts. Currently his work is widely represented in the Foundation he created in Quito, and also in prominent international art galleries and private collections.