Brazilian, 20th century, male.
Born 1938, in Araraquara (São Paulo); died 1992, in Asuncion, Paraguay.
Engraver (wood).
Abramo was primarily a wood engraver. In 1960, he founded an engraving studio in São Paulo in order to revive that technique. From 1948, he participated in artistic events in Brazil, receiving numerous prizes there, namely at the São Paulo Biennales in ...
(b Araraquara, 1903; d Asunción, Paraguay, 1992).
Brazilian printmaker and teacher. Abramo was born into a middle-class Italian immigrant family in Araraquara, in the state of São Paulo, before moving to the city of São Paulo in 1909. In 1911 he studied drawing with painter Enrico Vio (1874–1960) at the Colégio Dante Alighieri in São Paulo. In 1926 he came into contact with German Expressionism and the work of engraver Oswaldo Goeldi, and made his first woodcut print, Vista Chinesa (1926; Echauri de Muxfeldt 2012, pl. 122), depicting a village bridge in an Expressionist style. Initially self-taught in printmaking, his work addressed social themes such as the São Paulo working class. In 1928 and 1929 he created linocuts depicting images of the working class in a Cubist style for the newspaper Lo Spaghetto. In the early 1930s he became influenced by the paintings of Tarsila’s anthropophagic phase (1928–1929) and Lasar Segall’s Expressionism. In 1930 Abramo joined the Communist Party (PCB), but he was expelled in 1932 after he was accused of being a Trotskyist. In 1931 he began working as a draftsman for the ...
(b Guatemala, Jan 7, 1933).
Guatemalan painter and printmaker. From 1954 to 1957 he studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Guatemala City while researching folk art for the Dirección de Bellas Artes, but he was virtually self-taught and began as a draftsman and painter of bullfighting scenes. In 1958 he traveled to New York on a Guatemalan government grant, prolonging his stay there with further grants, studying at the Arts Students League and Graphic Art Center, and finally settling there permanently. He was influential in Guatemala until c. 1960, but because of his long residence abroad his work did not fit easily in the context of Central American art. Before leaving Guatemala he had painted landscapes and nudes in a naturalistic style, but he soon adopted a more modern idiom partly inspired by aboriginal Guatemalan subjects. After moving to New York, and especially from 1958 to 1961, his art underwent a profound transformation as he sought to bring together elements of abstract art and Surrealism and experimented with textures, for example in cross-hatched pen-and-ink drawings such as ...
Argentinian, 20th – 21st century, female.
Active also active in Spain.
Born 7 June 1947, in Realicó.
Painter, draughtswoman, lithographer.
In 1971, Adela became a history teacher. She lived in Buenos Aires until 1974 and then for a time in Miami before settling with her family in Barcelona and becoming a full-time painter and draughtswoman....
Uruguayan, 20th century, female.
Born 1928, in Montevideo.
Painter, engraver.
Having taught herself to paint at a very early age, Afamados de Sans enrolled in the engraving course at the national college of fine arts in Montevideo. She participated regularly in the national salon, where she obtained first prize in ...
Argentinian, 20th century, male.
Born 1897, in Buenos Aires.
Painter, engraver.
The son of Emilio Cornelio Agrelo, Daniel Marcos Agrelo received guidance from his father, as well as from Alfonso Bosco, who introduced engraving to Argentina. He took part in collective exhibitions in Latin America and received distinctions. He founded an art journal: ...
Argentinian, 19th – 20th century, male.
Born 16 September 1856, in Buenos Aires; died 16 September 1933, in Buenos Aires.
Engraver.
Emilio Carnelio Agrelo was self-taught and produced a large number of etchings. He introduced etching to Argentina in the last decade of the 19th century, before which the technique had been unknown. Emilio Agrela was obliged to pass his commissions on to artists in Paris. There is a room named after him at the national museum in Buenos Aires....
Cuban, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1947, in Pilon.
Engraver, lithographer, graphic designer.
Roger Aguilar graduated from the school of artistic education in Cuba in 1965. He has taken part in collective exhibitions since 1967. In 1975 he was awarded first prize for lithography at the National Engraving Salon. He works as a graphic artist for the Ministry of Culture....
Mexican, 20th century, male.
Born 1900, in Jalisco; died 1990.
Painter, engraver. Murals.
Aguirre was self-taught and began to draw at a very early age, but abandoned all artistic activity during the revolution from 1915 to 1917. He then settled in Mexico City, where he became assistant professor of drawing at the university. In ...
Argentinian, 20th century, male.
Active in Argentina, naturalised in 1909.
Born 20 October 1889, in Granada, Spain.
Painter, engraver. Local scenes (bullfighting).
Having arrived in Argentina at an early age, Alaminos studied at the school of fine arts in Tucumán. He became a teacher of painting there in ...
Argentinian, 20th century, female.
Born 17 May 1878, in Buenos Aires.
Painter.
Alazet-Rocamora attended the school of fine arts in Buenos Aires and was the student of several local painters, in particular Bosco, the engraver. She took part in various collective exhibitions in the major cities of Argentina and, from ...
Cuban, 20th century, male.
Active in France from 1963.
Born 1943, in Havana.
Painter (including gouache), engraver, illustrator.
José Ramón Alejandro studied at the school of fine arts in Buenos Aires and later at the school of fine arts in Montevideo. He went to Paris to work in the studio of the engraver Friedlaender. During his time there he showed his work in a number of solo exhibitions and in ...
Trinidadian, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1959, in Trinidad.
Engraver, watercolourist.
Kenneth Alfred was a resident at the Villa Medicis in 1990-1991. He received the Lacourière engraving prize in 1994. He lives and works in Montreuil. The mask is a central theme in his work....
(b Buenos Aires, Jan 25, 1923; d Jul 31, 1993).
Argentine draftsman, painter, and printmaker. He was self-taught and in 1943 began to illustrate publications throughout Latin America, continuing to do so for more than twenty years. His early work consisted of highly emotive ink drawings marked by an intricacy of design and lack of idealization, for example The Vacuum II (1976). He later worked in both pastels and oils to create spectral images of love, death, eroticism, and the obscure world of nightmares, fears, and terrors. Critics sometimes spoke of these in terms of Magic Realism, although he did not subscribe to any specific stylistic tendency. He often treated human heads and figures in fragmentary form, as if they were the victims of violent torture, and with a veiled but sarcastic humor.
With time Alonso gradually simplified his drawings and replaced his invented characters with fictional objects and childhood memories, moving towards more intimate and abstract work, for example in the pastel ...
(b La Piedad Cabadas, Michoacán, 1905; d Mexico City, 1981).
Mexican printmaker. His skill as a printmaker became apparent at an early age when he was employed as an assistant metal-engraver by Francisco Díaz de Léon at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City. In 1929 he succeeded his teacher Emilio Valadés as professor of printmaking and subsequently became Director of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas and of the Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura “La Esmeralda,” both in Mexico City. He was influential both as a teacher and for his virtuoso handling of traditional printmaking techniques, including line engraving, drypoint, aquatint, mezzotint, wood engraving, and linocut. His prints, mainly of Mexican landscapes, combine technical skill with affective expressiveness. He experimented constantly with methods of improving procedures, especially with mezzotint, with the modification of printing presses and with the introduction of new acids. Alvarado Lang also did much to popularize 19th-century Mexican prints as a collector and writer....
(b Le Havre, Oct 19, 1938).
Panamanian painter and printmaker of French birth. He first studied with the figurative painter Alberto Dutary but established himself in the 1960s as one of the few abstract artists in Panama with paintings such as Green Force (Panama City, Mus. A. Contemp.), which attest to the influence of American Abstract Expressionism; in other works he was also influenced by Post-painterly Abstraction. During a visit to Japan in 1969 he came into contact with Japanese art and Zen Buddhism, after which he sought to achieve the maximum impact of form and color through reduction to essentials. The techniques used in his acrylic paintings and drawings were well suited also to screenprints such as the series Form and Space (1975; Panama City, Gal. Etcétera). Alvarado was also active in organizing exhibitions for others and promoting the arts in Panama as director from 1970 to 1975 of the Departmento de Artes Plásticas of the Instituto Nacional de Cultura y Deportes....
(b Santiago de Veraguas, Mar 25, 1869; d Panama City, Nov 12, 1952).
Panamanian painter, draftsman, and printmaker. He is known chiefly as the designer of the national flag (1903) of Panama. He studied business administration and had a long career in public office. When Panama became independent in 1903, he became Secretario de Hacienda and in 1904 Consul-General ad honorem to Hamburg. In 1908 he moved to New York, where he studied with Robert Henri, who strongly influenced his style of vigorous drawing, loose brushwork, distorted expressionist images, and somber colors, as in Head Study (1910; Panama City, R. Miró priv. col.; see Miró 1966). He produced most of his work between 1910 and 1914 and again after the late 1930s; his main subject was the human figure, but he also painted portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. On his return to Panama in the 1930s he worked as an auditor in the Contraloría General. After his retirement he resumed painting and produced some of his most passionate works, such as ...
Brazilian, 20th century, male.
Born 1935.
Painter, engraver.
Goulart's rise to power in 1961 encouraged Brazilian artists to react and, consequently, to return to a form of representation that enabled them to denounce the political regime in their country. In this spirit Amaral produced engravings for the collection ...
(b São Paulo, 1935; d São Paulo, 2015).
Brazilian painter and printmaker. After studying engraving in São Paulo, he moved to New York in 1959 to complete his studies at the Pratt Graphic Center, where his contact with international Pop art merged with his own interest in Brazilian popular imagery, for example in the portfolio of woodcuts Mine and Yours (1967). Immediately afterwards he began painting ambiguous and ironic still lifes collectively titled Brasíliana, which use bananas as symbols of underdevelopment and exploitation, for example BR-1 SP (1970; São Paulo, Pin. Estado) and Bananas (1971; Washington, DC, Mus. Mod. A. Latin America). In 1971 he won a trip abroad in the National Salon of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro), which took him again to New York between 1972 and 1973. On his return to São Paulo he began the series Battlegrounds, in which he submitted the previously reclining bananas to slashing, torture, and putrefaction. Subsequently, shapes were reorganized into configurations of an undramatic Surrealism, playful, colorful, tumescent, and as firmly rooted as ever in his native Brazil and Latin America....
Costa Rican, 20th century, male.
Born 1907, in San José.
Painter, draughtsman, engraver, illustrator. Murals.
Amighetti studied painting at the academy of fine arts in Costa Rica, under the supervision of Tomás Povedano and Arcos, then taught drawing and engraving in Heredia to the future teachers there, as well as history of art and engraving at the school of fine arts at Costa Rica University. In Mexico, he discovered the techniques of mural painting under the supervision of Federico Cantu. He showed his works in exhibitions in Europe, Japan, Latin America and the USA. His drawings and wood engravings have illustrated many books and magazines....
