Oswaldo Guayasamín
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Oswaldo Guayasamín (July 6, 1919 – March 10, 1999, Quito, Ecuador) was a Latin American master painter and sculptor. He was born in Quito to a native father and a Mestiza mother. He created a Pan-American portrait of human and social differences. Guayasamín is considered one of the great master artists of Ecuador.
He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Quito as a painter and sculptor. He held his first exhibitition when he was 23, in 1942.
In 1948 he won the first prize at the Ecuadorian Salón Nacional de Acuarelistas y Dibujantes. In 1955, at the age of 36, won first prize at the Third Hispano-American Biennial of Art in Barcelona, for El ataúd blanco. In 1957 he was named the best South American painter at the Fourth Biennial of São Paulo.
His last exhibits were personally inaugurated in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, and in the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires in 1995. In Quito, Guayasamín built a museum that features his work. Guayasamín's images capture the political oppression, racism, poverty, and class division found in much of South America.
Oswaldo Guayasamín dedicated his life to painting, sculpting, collecting, fighting injustice and adulating the virtues of the Cuban Revolution in general and Fidel Castro in particular. He was given a prize for "an entire life of work for peace" by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. His death on March 10, 1999 was marked by a day of national strikes by the indigenous people (whom he spent his life supporting) and other sectors of society, was a great loss to Ecuador. He is still lauded as a national treasure.
