Indigenous Painting in Ecuador and Its Impact on Cultural Identity

Painting since ancient times has been part of the indigenous people as a form of expression and a path of development, a creative activity that, like all the others, fluctuates between the net aesthetic impulse and the tacit demand of the market. The painting values the indigenous tradition and seeks to repair the abuses of its population, which has suffered, rejection and ignorance by society, both politically, socially, economically, and culturally over time. The pioneers in indigenist paintings were indigenous people from the Tigua area, among others. For the development of this work, a review of the bibliography is considered, through consultations conducted in the databases of scientific articles focused on the indigenous painting of Ecuador. The results have shown, among other things, the particularities of indigenist painting, they have found that in Ecuador, from the second half of the 20th century, artists such as Eduardo Kingman and Oswaldo Guayasamín appear, and later representatives such as Heriberto Chango, make that indigenous painting be seen in a different way, Roberto Gómez, who uses a pseudonym “CAPAC”, as a recognition of the vindication of culture, ancestral knowledge and of his remote ancestors, in the same way Cristóbal Ortega Maila, Ramón Piaguaje, an artist Amazonian, Naekat Tiwip Chamik, from the Shuar culture. From that vision a current of indigenous painters was born who have taken over the art of painting as a form of representation of their knowledge of nature. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.