oswaldo Guayasamin

He began to paint and draw from his childhood, and he sold his works to tourists to pay for his studies.

The period during which Guayasamín received his aesthetic training was the period when the Indigenista School was at its peak, and the influence of this current on the painter is evident from his initial works.

In 1943 he spent seven months in the United States touring different museums in order to study the works of Goya and El Greco, among other masters.

The realization of this transcendental work was possible thanks to the support that Benjamín Carrión gave him from the recently created Casa de la Cultura.

Guayasamín combined the strength of the indigenous theme with the achievements of the avant-garde of the beginning of the century, especially cubism and expressionism, elements that can be seen in the Venetian glass mosaic mural called Homage to the American Man, which he painted in 1954 for the Simón Bolívar Center in the city of Caracas, Venezuela.

During 1958 he made two important murals in Ecuador: The discovery of the Amazon River, made in Venetian mosaic, which is located in the Government Palace of Quito, and the mural Historia del Hombre y la Cultura, for the Faculty of Jurisprudence of the University Center of Ecuador.

After several years of intense work, in 1968 he presented his second major series at the Museum of Fine Arts in Mexico City, entitled The Age of Wrath and made up of 260 works grouped by series (The Hands, Heads, The Man's Face, The Concentration Camps, Crying Women), in which the painter collected various elements of his vital experience to capture the drama and tragedy of the man of our time in a dazzling succession of canvases.

The age of anger has been considered one of the last great achievements of the political poster in 20th century painting and after its exhibition in Mexico it was presented, throughout 1973, at the Palacio de la Virreina (Barcelona), in the Galleries Nationals in Prague and at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

In 1973 he was appointed vice president, and later president, of the House of Culture of Quito, a position that allowed him to carry out an extensive program of cultural diffusion.

In 1981, the Ecuadorian House of Representatives recognized the work and significance of the artist through the creation of the Guayasamín Foundation, the country's cultural heritage, to which the painter donated his works and art collections.