The artist who paints historic reality

The image at the top of this blog is a mural by Salvadoran painter Antonio Bonilla which is located in the Guzman Anthropology museum in San Salvador.  The mural is entitled 200 años de lucha por la emancipación en El Salvador (2011) (200 years of struggle for the emancipation of El Salvador) and was commissioned by then president Mauricio Funes for the 200th anniversary of the independence of Central America from Spain.

Bonilla's works are intensely political, commenting on the social reality of the country.   The paintings can be satirical and ironic with a rejection of the official telling of Salvadoran history.

Other well known works of Bonilla include his painting Réquiem para los mártires  of the massacred Jesuit priests and their housekeeper and her daughter which hangs in the chapel at the UCA and another large mural of Salvadoran history at the convention and fair grounds (CIFCO) titled  Alegoría de la guerra civil y los Acuerdos de Paz (Allegory of the civil war and the Peace Accords) commissioned for the 20th anniversary of the 1992 peace accords.  

More images of the CIFCO mural here.

You can watch a video with an interview of Bonilla (in Spanish) describing some of his work.

Evelyn Galindo-Doucette discusses Bonilla's work in this blog post: The Silences of Antonio Bonilla's Memory Murals