González Goyri, Roberto (1924–)

Roberto González Goyri (b. 1924), Guatemalan artist, inspired by pre-Conquest cultures. He studied with Rafael Yela Günther at the Academy of Fine Arts in Guatemala City, where he received academic training, and worked as a draftsman at the National Museum of Archeology. On a grant from the Guatemalan government, he studied in New York from 1948 to 1952. International recognition came in 1951, when he won a prize for a sculpture of the unknown political prisoner in a contest sponsored by the London Institute of Contemporary Arts. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired his semiabstract sculpture The Wolf (1951) in 1955. He was director of the National School of Plastic Arts in Guatemala City (1957–1958).

As a sculptor, González Goyri worked with terracotta, concrete, and metals combining an expressionist, symbolic style with abstract motifs. His mural and sculptural projects for public buildings, such as the Social Security Institute in Guatemala City (1959), and his monumental sculpture of the Guatemalan Indian hero Tecún-Umán (1963) symbolically depict Guatemalan history from the dawn of Maya civilization to independence. As a painter, he has worked primarily in a postcubist style, inspired by the strong colors found in Guatemalan crafts. His mural Religion in Guatemala: Its Pre-Hispanic, Colonial, and Contemporary Roots (1992) is a monumental interpretation of Guatemalan religious life, from the Popol Vuh, the sacred Maya book, to the present.

See alsoArt: The Twentieth Century .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gilbert Chase, Contemporary Art in Latin America (1970), pp. 46-48, 247-248.

José Gómez Sicre, Roberto González Goyri (1986).

Delia Quiñonez, Mural "La religión en Guatemala, sus raíces prehispánicas, coloniales y sincréticas contemporáneas" (1992).

Additional Bibliography

González Goyri, Roberto, Dennis Leder, and Luisa Fernanda González Pérez. Roberto González Goyri. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Editorial Antigua, 2003.

Méndez de la Vega, Luz, Roberto Cabrera, and Thelma Castillo Jurado. Guatemala: Arte contemporáneo. Guatemala: Fundación G & T, 1997.

                                        Marta Garsd