Tábara, Enrique (1930–)

Enrique Tábara (b. 1930), Ecuadorian artist. Tábara studied painting at the School of Fine Arts in Guayaquil, his native city, and began to paint abstract compositions in 1954. As a young painter, he was influenced by the constructivist movement (founded by Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin in 1913), of which he learned through the work of Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García and Ecuadorean painter Manuel Rendón. With the aid of a fellowship from the Ecuadorian House of Culture the following year, he moved to Barcelona, where he studied at the School of Fine Arts and participated in the city's Hispanic-American Biennial (1955). He was influenced by Spanish informalism, from which he derived heavy impastos and textures, applying them to a repertoire of pre—Conquest-inspired themes: Ecuadorian Indian traditions, including rattlesnakes, mirrors, feathers, hieroglyphics, pyramids, and other motifs. During his years in Barcelona, his circle of friends included artists such as André Breton and Joan Miró. He was also connected to the members of the Spanish postwar movement called Dau al Set, which included Antoni Tapies and Manolo Millares. Like the surrealists and dadaists, the work of the Dau al Set artists dialogued with both the conscious and the unconscious human mind.

Returning to Ecuador in 1964, Tábara founded VAN, an Ecuadorian artists' movement against figurative indigenist art (1968). In the early 1970s he turned to a new figuration, often depicting human limbs across his canvases. He won a gold medal at the First Salon of Drawing, Watercolor, and Tempera at the House of Culture in Quito (1970). Throughout his career, his work has been shown at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and the Modern Art Museum in Bogotá. He has been the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Swiss Abstract Painting Prize in 1960 and the Gold Brush of Ecuador in 1999. As of 2007, he still lives in Guayaquil, although he frequently visits Barcelona.

See alsoArt: The Twentieth Century; Torres García, Joaquín.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

González, Areán; Carlos Antonio; and Enrique Tábara. Tábara. Quito, Ecuador: Doble O Producciones, 1990.

Tábara, Enrique. Tábara. Guayaquil, Ecuador: E. Tábara, 1993.

Traba, Marta. Museum of Modern Art of Latin America: Selections from the Permanent Collection (1985), pp. 114-115.

                                              Marta Garsd