Recuerdo de Oruro, 1998

Raúl Lara Torrez  

Raúl Lara Torrez is considered one of the most important Bolivian painters of the 20th century. He was a representative of what is called the Barroque-Mestizo (baroque and mixed race) style, which emerged mainly in the Andean villages of Bolivia. In a broader sense his style is often categorized as the pictorial equivalent of the Latin American literary magical realism movement. His characters embody this cultural “milieu" of Indian and European origins put together. Miners and peasants enter a new universe, the big city, and try to adapt to it in their search for better days. The works by Raul Lara vindicate the “Cholo", the mixed-race man, using him and his surroundings as the main themes in many of his paintings.

Raul Lara was born at the San Jose mining center in Oruro. He started painting at the age of 11 in the studio of his eldest brother, Gustavo, 9 years older and already an artist. Gustavo immediately recognized his brother´s talent and provided him with painting lessons mainly focusing on landscape painting. At 14, Raúl organized his first solo show in Northern Argentina with paintings depicting scenes from the folklore of Oruro and Jujuy. The Argentinian poet Domingo Zerpa visited the show and was so impressed by his paintings that he invited Raúl to move to Buenos Aires.

In 1957 Raul Lara entered the workshops of the Association for the Encouragement of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires, and in 1959 he became a member of the Espartaco Group, integrated by prominent Argentinian artists. He won a scholarship by the National Fund for the Arts of Argentina to attend the Superior School of Fine Arts “Ernesto de la Cárcoba", the most prestigious in the country, where he specialized in muralism and later became a professor.

In the 1970s his brother Jaime Rafael Lara Torrez was kidnapped and disappeared under the Argentinian dictatorship. This event forced Gustavo and Raul into “self-exile" and to return into Bolivia, where sadly, at that time, they were met other emerging dictatorships. In Bolivia, Raul Lara established his residence in Cochabamba, where he was able to continue working until his death in 2011.