Mario Urteaga Alvarado

Who was Mario Urteaga Alvarado?

Urteaga Alvarado, Mario was a Peruvian painter. He originally worked as a painter, photographer and upon his return to Cajamarca from Lima he works as a school teacher, farming and journalist.

Unlike their Indigenism colleagues, trained in the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Lima and assets, Urteaga was a self-taught artist and had developed the central work of his paintings in Cajamarca. This circumstance contributed to shaping the image of the artist as topical spontaneous product of his environment and to project an ambivalent perception of his work, sometimes classified as non-academic and as a manifestation of the independent indigenousness. With a mix of classicism and naturally it was fascinating to the viewer of his time, peasant scenes carefully composed by the artist seemed to embody the peripheral end of the nationalist aspirations of an entire generation would have achieved Urteaga display "Indians more Indians have been painted", according to the concluding sentence of Teodoro Núñez Ureta. The reality of his work and his life, however, is offers much more contradictory and complex.