|Nacimiento:||1930 en Ecuador|
|Residencia:||Reside en Ecuador|
|Profesionales que le han comisariado:|
|Organizaciones con obra:||Art Museum of the Americas (AMA), Blanton Museum of Art, Museo de Dibujo Julio Gavín - Castillo de Larrés|
Enrique Tábara’s painting Superstition sits on the border between abstraction and figuration. In an extremely limited palette, Tábara renders a linear figure in gray and white against a black background. The figure consists of a central “face” that seems to be consuming a smaller figure with two beady eyes. Balancing on three fingers, its weighty form floats above the ground. On the right is a square shield decorated with simple graphic markings. While the image at times coalesces into a monstrous form, it also reads as a linear pattern of abstract designs. The designs themselves are etched into the thickly textured paint, making the artist’s process evident to the viewer. The title Superstition conjures ideas of the dark and mysterious world of an imagined primitive, a hallucinatory world of altered states where beasts consume their unsuspecting prey and morph into unknown forms. While there is no direct connection to pre-Columbian myths or decorative objects in Tábara’s composition, he evokes a correlation through suggestion, via the dark stonelike palette, the rough application of paint, the pictogram-like etchings on the surface, and the mysterious beast that emerges from the abstract surface. In the brochure for Tábara’s show at the Pan American Union in the summer of 1964, José Gómez Sicre explained his work as follows: “Among artists who have broken with the Indianist trend that until recently characterized Ecuadoran painting Enrique Tábara has won a place of distinction… His work is a pageant of form, texture, and rhythm which seems to spring from the hieroglyphs of pre-Columbian America and yet is so thoroughly modern in spirit.” Superstition was one of the paintings in this 1964 exhibition. Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1930, Enrique Tábara received his artistic training at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Guayaquil where he studied under Luis Martinez Serrano and German artist Hans Michaelson. In 1955 he received a grant from the Ecuadoran government to study in Spain at the Escuela Oficial de Bellas Artes in Barcelona and that same year he exhibited in the Tercera Bienal Hispanoamericana in Barcelona. He remained in Barcelona from 1955 to 1964, participating in numerous group and individual exhibitions in Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Portugal. While living in Spain he came in contact with the Spanish informalists, such as Antoni Tàpies and Antonio Sauro, and associated with the Dau-al-Set movement, the first avant-garde artistic collective to emerge in Catalonia after World War II. Tábara was one of three artists to represent Ecuador at the Third Biennial of Paris in 1963. The following year, he returned to Ecuador where he began to incorporate references to pre-Columbian mythology and motifs into his work. Also in 1964, José Gómez Sicre invited him to hold his first U.S. exhibition at the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C. In Ecuador Tábara, together with several other artists, founded the artists’ collective VAN (Vanguardia Artística Nacional), a group that opposed the predominance of indigenism in Ecuadoran painting and advocated for a new approach to art-making that was simultaneously universal and rooted in the region’s pre-Columbian culture. In the late 1960s he developed his signature “Patas-Patas” paintings, works that featured feet and legs as their primary motif. In 1988 Tábara received the Premio Eugenio Espejo, Ecuador’s most prestigious National Award for Art, Literature, and Culture.