The artist Fernando de Szyszlo was born in 1925 and die in 2017 in Lima, Peru. De Szyszlo began to study architecture, nevertheless, he decided to live and started to study art at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Later on, he would travel to Europe, and being there he would know firsthand abstractionism and, with the help of his friends Octavio Paz y André Breton, surrealism.

When he returns to Peru his paintings were abstract, but over time he began to create his own artistic language. He would start to deal with Peruvian and Latin American issues through a non-representative style. De Szyszlo managed to reinterpret all the elements that he learned about surrealism from the Latin American context and establish a proper and collective identity.

The paints of Fernando de Szyszlo create tensions between the primitive and the civilized, the magical and rational, the barbaric and refined, and the first world and the third world. His paint’s rescues the pre-Columbian myth and the images from the non-representative and the use of muted colors.