A New Image: The Figurative Turn in Central American Art, 1969–1980

The years 1969-1971 were transformative for Central American art. Since the late 1950s, artists across the isthmus had worked extensively with abstraction. At the advent of the 1970s, however, many artists made a self-conscious and strident return to figurative art. Focusing on the work of three Central American artists –– Felo García (Costa Rica, 1928-2023), Roberto Cabrera (Guatemala, 1939-2014), and Dino Aranda (Nicaragua, b. 1945) –– this dissertation investigates the figurative turn in the art of Central America. Each of these artists played a central role in abstractionist groups in their respective countries, but later produced work aligned with multiple strands of neo-figuration. I demonstrate that artists in Central America found in figuration the most useful way to respond to social circumstances of civil conflict, revolution, and demographic and economic change. Figuration allowed these artists to wrestle with questions of realism and representation, trouble the distinctions between abstraction and figuration, to analyze the effects of mass media in situations of violence, and to critically engage with a newly urbanizing built environment.

In each case study, I focus on the differing models of representation and viewership that figuration sustained in Central American art. Probing beyond mimesis, I ask how figuration works, how it makes meaning, and what it demands of its viewers. I also put pressure on both Western and Latin American accounts of figuration that see the 1960s and 70s as a moment of definitive break with abstraction and with painting as a medium, emphasizing crucial points of continuity between these artists’ abstract and neo-figurative phases.