Oswaldo Guayasamin biography
Oswaldo Guayasamin, was born in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, on July 6, 1919. He graduated from the School of Fine Art in Quito as painter and sculptor. He carried out his first exhibit when he was 23, in 1942.
He achieved in his youth all National Awards, and was credited, in 1952, at the age of 33, the Grand Award of the Biennial of Spain and later the Grand Award of the Biennial of Sao Paulo. His last exhibits were personally inaugurated in the Palace Museum of Luxemberg in Paris, and in the Museo Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires, in 1995.
He died on March 10, 99, when he was 79 years old.
His work has been shown in museums in all capitals of America and in many countries in Europe, for example, in Leningrade (L'Ermitage), Moscow, Prague, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, and Warsaw. He carried out 180 individual exhibits, and his production was fruitful in paintings, murals, sculptures and monuments.
He has murals in Quito (Government and Legislative Palaces; Central University; Provincial Council); Madrid (Barajas airport); Paris (UNESCO headquarters); Sao Paulo (Latin American Parliament). In his monuments "A la Patria Joven" (To the Young Country) (Guayaquil, Ecuador); "A la Resistencia" (To the Resistence) (Rumiñahui) in Quito.
His humanist work, marked as expressionist, reflects the pain and misery that the larger part of humanity has endured, and denounces the violence that every human being has had to live with in this monstrous 20th. century marked by world wars, civil wars, genocide, concentration camps, dictatorships, and tortures. He had been working on his top work " The Chapel of Man " when he died.
