Pérez Esquivel: “All my art has to do with life” | THE TERRITORY news from Misiones

The exhibition of the Nobel Peace Prize winner and visual artist Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (90), which brings together drawings, paintings, engravings and sculptures made from 1950 to the present and proposes a look at Latin America, its cultures and its social concerns, highlights scene a trajectory that links art, history and militancy.

In this way, under the title Paths of art of yesterday and today, the exhibition presents a journey through the different periods of the artist, through some 40 works that stage a career that links art, history and militancy.

Pérez Esquivel himself says about the show: ”I want to tell the story of Latin America. First I am an artist, then a militant. The two things merge, all my art has to do with life, with what I do and I think that’s important”.

Curated by Laura Casanovas, the exhibition exhibits “scenes that glimpse identities and cultures, urban life, social struggles, the religious faith of the homeless, war, the limit at times too fragile between life and death, dictatorships and the disappearances, the artistic manifestations of the towns, women and family affections”, advances the person in charge of the curatorship.

Meanwhile, he graphed Esquivel’s personality as an artist. ”There was never a split, in his case, between art and struggle. The drawings in ink and graphite, the woodcuts, the acrylic paintings and the sculptures in bronze, wood, marble and cement discover different stylistic stages with plastic proposals close to both realism and the avant-garde, especially with Latin American roots, but with solutions own formals.

Personality of the country, Pérez Esquivel was born in Buenos Aires on November 26, 1931, he learned to carve wood in the Spanish Board of Schoolchildren where he was a pupil. His grandmother, Eugenia, who speaks Guarani, was the one who transmitted to him the history and tradition of the native peoples who are represented in his work. She was born in Corrientes, she instilled in him spirituality and the connection with “mother earth”.

Thus, figures such as Pachamama, the priestesses and Amanda Guerreño, composer and mother of her three children, are also protagonists of her canvases.

He studied at the Manuel Belgrano National School of Fine Arts and simultaneously his social concerns awoke. His intense artistic activity was concentrated on painting, murals and monuments, among which the Latin American Way of the Cross and the Lenten Cloth made in 1992 to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the conquest of America and one of the most widespread works of the.

As a militant, he suffered arrests and torture and was dismissed from his teaching positions by the last civic-military dictatorship after August 1977.

In 1980 he received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of the fight for human rights in a context of violence and dictatorships in Latin America.

In addition, he was president of the Honorary Council of the Peace and Justice Service of Latin America and is a member of the Permanent Court of Peoples, of the Honorary Committee of the international coordination for the decade of non-violence and peace.

The exhibition opens on Saturday, July 2 at 1:00 p.m. at the Lucy Mattos Museum, located at Avenida Del Libertador 17426, Beccar, San Isidro district, Buenos Aires.