Cuatro Amigas (Four Friends)

A leading Peruvian artist, Ernesto Gutierrez, was born in Lima, Peru, in 1941. His father was a Spaniard and his mother was a descendant of the Inca. Upon completion of his high school education, Gutierrez entered the School of Fine Arts in Lima, Peru, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1964 and was awarded a Gold Medal. Sponsored by the Brazilian government, Gutierrez received the Itamarti Scholarship and studied for two years (1966-67) at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro while extensively exhibiting his works throughout the art centers of South America: Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Cordova, Santiago de Chile, and Lima, among others. In 1971, Gutierrez was granted a Fulbright Scholarship and studied at the University of Wisconsin where he received a Master of Fine Arts Degree in 1974. Gutierrez has been influenced by both local and global artistic factors: pre-Columbian forms and native-popular Peruvian art and also by modern French masters such as Cezanne, Gaugin, and to some extent, Matisse. The boldness of Gutierrez's colors creates an almost sensual excitement: shocking pink, chartreuse, mauve, and the whole gamut of blues, purples, and greens, often underlined and emphasized by complementary colors. In some of his paintings, Gutierrez assumes a cubist-realist simplification of forms and volumes and a precise rendering of surfaces. Gutierrez's sensibility strikes the viewer as essentially Spanish, while his inspiration derives from his Inca heritage, Peruvian landscapes, and folklore.