The Wake is an early painting by the Italian-Uruguayan Jorge Damiani, whose inclusion in the Dallas Museum of Fine Art’s South American Art Today in 1959 launched his career in the United States.

1956

This painting is Alejandro Obregón’s seminal work reacting to the violent turmoil of the Colombian civil war. Beginning in 1948, political and social chaos plagued the population of Bogotá and beyond, leaving as many as 250,000 dead.

Despite his success in abstraction, Enrique Zañartu rejected categorization with Chilean modernists and staunchly believed himself to be a realist. Working in the shadow of his younger brother, the print magnate Nemesio Antúnez, Zañartu took on the surname of his mother, divorcing himself from the fame received by the familial figurehead of modern Chilean art.

Chilean painter, engraver, and instructor Rodolfo Opazo Bernales has been an active figure in Latin American art since the 1950s. At that time, the majority of his contemporaries abandoned figural forms for abstraction; Opazo Bernales did the reverse.