(b Ambato, 8 Oct 1931). Ecuadorean painter and draughtsman. He studied architecture at the Universidad Central del Ecuador, Quito. In 1960 he won the Gran Premio at the Salón Mariano Aguilera with Man, House and Moon (Quito, Mus. Municipal Alberto Mena Caamaño), with which he expressed an ongoing attempt to come to terms with the past and with the history of South America, as well as a desire to move beyond the anecdotal language of some Ecuadorean art. There followed a brief ‘Pre-Columbian’ phase, during which he sought mestizo symbols for his painting. By the mid-1960s his work was abstract, and by 1970 he had moved on to assemblage and a rejection of previous pictorial language, producing compositions of rag dolls, old cement bags and the gold borders of ecclesiastical vestments and other elements redolent of Latin America’s colonial past. In the 1970s he continued to use rag dolls coupled with other textures, for example in We Are Wanderers of the Night and of Suffering (1979; Quito, artist’s col.). Viteri’s conceptually based art sought to universalize from a mestizo perspective Andean and characteristic local themes, such as isolation, in a highly contemporary language that helped rejuvenate Ecuadorean art.

• Viteri, Oswaldo
  • Ecuador, §IV, 2: Painting, graphic arts and sculpture, after 1822