Art and culture in the amazonic contemporary painting: Guimer Garcías’s “El buho”

Abstract

This article reveals the relation between the author’s artistic work and his culture, showing it is impossible to understand a work of art without knowing it´s cultural context. This is an approach to the author, based on interviews applied like ethnographic methodology, which has allowed us to analyze and comprehend the artist’s production, for he is known as such only by an ethno-Amazonian artisan group. In this text, important ideas about culture are reevaluated before applied to the case of indigenous painting. The outcome is a different interpretation of the piece “El búho” by the Amazonian-Peruvian painter Guímer García. This piece shows the work of art in complex cultural terms that allow to rethink the artist´s work.

Keywords: Culture, Painting, Shipibo, Interpretation, Amazonian art.