Oswaldo Guayasamín

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Oswaldo Guayasamín (July 6, 1919 – March 10, 1999, Quito, Ecuador) was an Ecuadorian master painter and sculptor. He was born in Quito to a native father and a Mestiza mother. His family was poor and his father worked as a carpenter for most of his life. He later worked as a taxi and truck driver. He was the first child of ten children in his family. When he was young, he enjoyed drawing caricatures of his teachers and the children that he played with. He showed an early love for art. He created a Pan-American portrait of human and social inequalities which reached international recognition.

When he was young, he enjoyed drawing caricatures of his teachers and the children that he played with. He showed an early love for art.

He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Quito as a painter and sculptor. He also studied architecture there. He held his first exhibition when he was 23, in 1942. While he was attending college, his best friend died during a demonstration in Quito. This incident, would later inspire one of his paintings, "Los Ninos Muertos." This event helped him to form his vision about the people and the society that he lived in.

In 1948 he won the first prize at the Ecuadorian Salón Nacional de Acuarelistas y Dibujantes. In 1955, at the age of 36, he won first prize at the Third Hispano-American Biennial of Art in Barcelona, for El ataúd blanco and in 1957 he was named the best South American painter at the Fourth Biennial of São Paulo.

During 1942 and 1943, Guayasamin travelled to the United States and Mexico, where he met Orozco. They travelled together to many of the diverse countries in Latin America. They visited countries like Peru, Brazil, Chile Argentina, and Uruguay. Through these travels he found the indigenous lifestyle an dpoverty that appeared in his paintings.

One of his biggest and most controversial paintings was a mural that he painted for the congress of Ecuador. In 1988, he was asked by the congress of Ecuador to paint a mural depicting the history of Ecuador. The United States Government critiqued the mural because in one of the panels, there appeared a Nazi helmet with the lettering CIA, referring to the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States.

The artist's last exhibits were inaugurated by him personally 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, however, he adulated the ideals of the communist 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, and was considered a great loss to Ecuador. He is still lauded as a national treasure.

In 2002, three years after his death, Oswaldo's masterwork, La Capilla del Hombre ("The Chapel of Man"), was completed and opened to the public. The Chapel is meant to document not only man's cruelty to man but also the potential for greatness within humanity. It is co-located with Guayasamín's home in the hills overlooking Quito.