Untitled

During the 1930s and 1940s, artists living in Ecuador practiced a style characterized by social realism and indigenism, at times in dialogue with European avant-garde. Tábara was one of many Ecuadorian artists who sought to modernize his country’s visual language in the ensuing decades. He traveled to Spain in 1955 and studied the visible impasto and textures characteristic of Spanish informalism while exploring a broad repertory of pre-Hispanic themes, which formed the basis of his mature work between abstraction and figuration. The present work refers to his iconic “Patas-Patas” paintings, which feature feet and legs; here, oversized insects climb the disembodied limbs, introducing a strange and almost surreal relationship between man and nature.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and by Jeanette Bolden.