Eduardo Kingman

Eduardo Kingman Riofrío (born February 3, 1913 in Loja , † November 27, 1997 in Quito ) was an Ecuadorian painter .

Life

Kingman was the son of an American doctor who came to Ecuador via the South American Development Company and worked there first at the Portovelo gold mines and later moved to the capital Quito, and was an Ecuadorian widowed by her first marriage. His brother Nicolás Kingman was a well-known writer.

Kingman began studying at the Escuela de Bellas Artes art school in Quito in the late 1920s . His most important teacher was Víctor Mideros , and Camilo Egas also taught there at the time. After the family moved to Guayaquil in 1931, alongside his studies and changing activities, he became part of the port city's developing intellectual scene. In 1933 he exhibited his works for the first time in Guayaquil. In the late 1930s he moved back to Quito, where he worked for the art school and participated in various exhibitions and salons.

In 1940 the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought one of his oil paintings. In the following years Kingman traveled to the USA , Venezuela and Peru on study trips and exhibitions . In 1944 he was one of the founding members of the Ecuadorian cultural institute Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana , whose founder Benjamín Carrión was an admirer of Mexican murals, which unexplained the life of the indigenous population. He encouraged Kingman in his related work.

In 1950 Kingman was appointed director of the Ecuadorian Museum of Colonial Art in Quito, a post he held for more than 20 years. At the same time he was a professor at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Quito. At the end of the 1970s he retired to his Posada Soledad in the small town of San Rafaél at the gates of Quito. He died in Quito in 1997 after suffering severe pneumonia.

His works have been exhibited in Bogotá, Caracas, Mexico City, San Francisco, Paris, the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington and at the United Nations headquarters in New York. He won numerous prizes at salons and received various honors.

Kingman had been married to Bertha Jijón Ante since 1948 and had two children.

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An overarching theme of Kingman's paintings, lithographs and woodwork is the hardships of the indigenous population of Ecuador. In particular, the hands and faces of the people portrayed by Kingman expressively show the hardship and poverty of living conditions. With this turning away from bourgeois themes in painting, he pioneered a generation that also included painters like Oswaldo Guayasamín .

In addition to his art, Kingman's social commitment and his writing activities were also shaped by his commitment to the indigenous population.

Web links

• Posada de las Artes Kingman , website of the Kingman Museum in Quito, with works by the artist (Spanish)
• El pintor y sus manos. Homenaje a Eduardo Kingman , special supplement to La Hora newspaper , Quito, 2003 (Spanish)
• Rudolfo Pérez Pimentel, Eduardo Kingman Riofrío , In: Diccionario Biográfico del Ecuador , Guayaquil 1987–, Volume 8, pp. 207f.