Art in Costa Rica

If you are an art enthusiast and will like to get to know the national artists after settling down in your real estate property, there are many places you can visit. Buyowner Costa Rica has made some research for you in this aspect, digging into the history of local art movements, so that any art aficionados interested in purchasing property in Costa Rica will do it in the right place and will be able to fit right in.

Santa Ana and adjacent Escazú (just to the southwest of San José) have been magnets for artists for a long time. Escazú in particular is home to many contemporary artists: Christina Fournier, the brothers Jorge, Manuel, Javier, and Carlos Mena as well as Dinorah Bolandi, who was awarded the nation's top cultural prize. Here, in the late 1920s, Teodorico Quirós and a group of contemporaries provided the nation with its own identifiable art style: the Costa Rican "Landscape" movement. This movement, expressed in stylized forms, gave life to the flavor and personality of the drowsy little mountain towns with their cobblestone streets and adobe houses back-dropped by volcanoes. The artists, who called themselves the Group of New Sensibility, began to portray Costa Rica in fresh, vibrant colors.

In his time, Quirós had been influenced by the French impressionists. His painting El Portón Rojo ("The Red Gate") hangs in the Costa Rican Art Museum. In 1994, at age 77, Teodorico Quirós was given the national Premio Magón award for lifetime achievement in the "creation and promotion of Costa Rican artistic culture." The group also included Luisa Gonzales de Saenz, whose paintings evoke the style of Magritte, the expressionist Manuel de la Cruz (also known as the"Costa Rican Picasso") as well as Enrique Echandi, who expressed a Teutonic sensibility following studies in Germany.

In the sphere of sculpture, one of the finest examples from this period is the chiseled stone image of a child suckling his mother's breast. This beautiful statue can be seen outside the Maternidad Carit maternity clinic in southern San José. Its creator was Francisco Zuñigo (Costa Rica's most acclaimed sculptor), who left for Mexico in a fit of artistic temper in 1936 when the sculpture, titled Maternity, was lampooned by local critics (one said it looked more like a cow than a woman).

By the late 1950s, a large number of local artists looked down on the work of the previous generation as the art of casitas (little houses) and were indulging in more abstract styles. The current batch of young artists has broadened their expressive visions and is now gaining mounting international recognition for their diverse works.

Isidro Con Wong, from Puntarenas but of Mongolian descent, is known for a style redolent of magic realism and has works in permanent collections in several U.S. and French museums. Starting out as a poor farmer, he commenced by painting with his fingers and achiote, a red paste made from a seed. Nowadays, thanks to his amazing artistic skills, his paintings sell for about $35,000USD each.

In Puerto Limón on the Caribbean coast, Leonel González paints images of the port with figures reduced to thick black silhouettes against backgrounds of splendid colors. Nonetheless, the cheekiest of contemporary artists is perhaps Roberto Lizano, who collides just like Delacroix with Picasso and likes to train his eye on the pretentiousness of ecclesiastics.

Alajuelan artist Gwen Barry is acclaimed for her "Movable Murals": painted screens populated by characters from Shakespeare and the Renaissance. Rafa Fernández is heavily influenced by his many years in Spain, defined as "magic realism, where the beauty and grandness of women is explored with a sense of intimacy and suggestion." His ladies often appear in quasi-Victorian guise wearing floral hats.

Also, Rolando Castellón, who won acclaim in the U.S. and was a director of the New York Museum of Modern Art before returning to Costa Rica in 1993, translates elements of indigenous life into 3-D art. His studio gallery in Zapote, Moyo Coyatzin, is named for the indigenous deity of creativity.

Nowadays, you simply can't travel far in Costa Rica these days without seeing examples of the works of another Escazú artist, Katya de Luisa, whose stunning photo collages are complex allegories. Katya initiated "Encounters With Art," a collaborative effort in which artists from different media contribute to a single work.

The Ministry of Culture subsidizes art lessons and exhibits on Sundays in city parks. University art galleries, the Museo de Arte Costarricense as well as many smaller galleries scattered throughout San José exhibit works of all kinds.