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Biography

Oswaldo Vigas - Artists - GALERÍA RGR

(Valencia, Venezuela, 1923 - Caracas, Venezuela, 2014)

Oswaldo Vigas was a Venezuelan artist who pioneered the blending of abstraction and figuration with rituals of popular culture and folklore. Best known as a painter, polemist, and muralist, his work spanned sculpture, print, drawing, ceramic, and tapestry. Predominantly recognized as a self-taught artist, Vigas avoided the artistic canon of post war Venezuelan geometric abstraction to build his own language. His work was inspired by the magical, the mythical, and the telluric of local and Latin American imaginary, a line of research that would be the common thread of his oeuvre. He is considered one of the essential figures of Informalism in South America.

Jointly with Alejandro Otero and Los Disidentes, Vigas participated at the Proyecto de Integración de las Artes de la Universidad Central de Venezuela designed by architect Carlos Raul Villanueva. In 1954, he represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale. In 1992 he participated in the XXVI International Prize of Contemporary Art of Monaco, receiving the first prize, and in 1999, the Iberian-American FIA Art Fair chose him as the honored artist. Oswaldo Vigas died in Caracas in 2014 at the age of 90 years.

Today, his works are part of the collections of important public institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Museum of the Americas, OAS, in Washington, D.C., the Musée Des Beaux Arts D’Angers, and the Musée Des Beaux-Arts in Reims; the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile to name a few; as well as in numerous important private collections around the world.