Pacheco, María Luisa (1919–1982)

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Pacheco, María Luisa (1919–1982)

María Luisa Pacheco (b. 22 September 1919; d. 21 April 1982), Bolivian artist. Pacheco studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in her native La Paz with nativists Cecilio Guzmán de Rojas and Jorge de la Reza. She pursued further studies at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, and with the Spanish cubist Daniel Vásquez Días (1951–1952). Back in Bolivia, she founded Eight Contemporaries, a modernist group. She expressed her social consciousness in themes such as idol-like figures and women miners (Idols, 1956; Palliri, 1958), rendering them as fragmented planar structures (1953–1958). In 1956 she moved to New York, where she received a Solomon R. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship (1958–1960).

After 1959 Pacheco eliminated all figurative and ethnic elements in her painting. Her late style consisted of broad areas of brilliant hues and somber colors, penetrating one another in a constructivist manner. Under the general influence of international expressive abstraction, she emphasized texture and explored some accidental methods of execution (Anamorphosis, 1971, and Catavi, 1975). Although some have perceived her paintings as interpretations of the Andean environment, she claimed that subjective expression was her primary motivation. She was influential in the acceptance of abstraction in Bolivia. She died in New York City.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rigoberto Villarroel Claure, Bolivia: Art in Latin America Today, translated by Ralph E. Dimmick (1963), pp. 13, 45-49.

Félix Angel, Tribute to María Luisa Pacheco of Bolivia: 1919–1982 (1986) and "The Latin American Presence," in The Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920–1970, by Luis R. Cancel et al. (1988), pp. 242-243.