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Social Reality and Artistic Modernity 1916-1958
A project of EACHEVE FOUNDATION
CURATOR: Trinidad Pérez
From July 18, 2024, to February 9, 2025, at the Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art (MAAC)
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EACHEVE is a foundation dedicated to preserving, studying, promoting, and disseminating Ecuador’s art.
It has published over ten books and prints under its publishing label in the last decade. Through its management, it has been able to grant scholarships to more than a dozen artists to participate in prestigious international residencies. In addition, he has provided financial support —and the academic and logistical coordination required— to produce more than 25 exhibitions, inside and outside the country.
The exhibition project conceived under the letterhead “Activating the MAAC Reserve” illustrates the collaboration between public institutions and the private sector, and it shows EACHEVE Foundation’s clear commitment to the local cultural industry: its museums, collections, artists, and diverse agents.
We have invited renowned art historians such as Trinidad Perez and Rodolfo Kronfle Chambers to offer curatorial narratives that broaden the knowledge of fundamental sections of the artistic production of the 20th century in the country. The task starts from the patrimonial collections to enhance their value, including works that have not been exhibited for decades, along with several that will be unpublished for a large part of the public. The fundamental objective is to settle a debt with several generations that haven’t had the opportunity to know their stories closely and in an articulated way. We hope you enjoy this joint effort.
Eliana Hidalgo Vilaseca
Founder and Director of EACHEVE Foundation
SOCIAL REALITY AND ARTISTIC MODERNITY 1916-1958
“Social Reality and Artistic Modernity: Ecuador, 1916-1958” explores an early moment of artistic modernity in Ecuador, when artists accompanied processes of politicization and mobilization of the popular groups and, at times, acted alongside them.
More frequently, they did so from the aesthetic strategies of the visual arts; they sought to denounce social injustices, vindicate the rights of the most vulnerable and, at times, join the social protest. The exhibition proposes that artistic modernity in our country, as in other parts of Latin America, arose hand in hand with a growing interest in social issues and reached its apogee, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s, with social realism. Here we open a broader temporal arc to look at some early steps in this direction and other later closing moments. Thus, it covers approximately forty years, starting with Las floristas (The Florists) by Camilo Egas, of 1916, and culminating with his Abstracción (Abstraction), in 1958. The year 1916 marks a possible beginning of artistic modernity in our country by introducing the representation of Indigenous societies in large format paintings in a modern artistic language and by including this type of painting in the configuration of a novel local art scene. On the other hand, 1958 is a moment of renewal of indigenism through a cubist/futurist gesture, which allows for new explorations of cultural identity.
1916-1958: is the extended period in which diverse artistic and political positions on social reality are manifested. The social realism of the thirties and forties privileges an explicit figurative language that appropriates elements of French Fauvism, German Expressionism, and cubism. This period brings together the accumulation of Mexican muralism and the local pictorial tradition to, through them, go from empathetically recognizing the cultural values of the popular groups to denouncing the abuses exercised on them. Social realism includes the Indigenous movement but also transcends it since it represents Indigenous people, montubios, women, and even children as workers. The works presented here reconsider the social question from the critical positions allowed by contemporary visual languages.
This exhibition was supported by Atún Real, Oro Verde Hoteles y Almacenes La Ganga