Enrique Tábara

In 1988, Tábara was awarded the Premio Eugenio Espejo, the country's most prestigious National Award for Art, Literature and Culture presented by the president of Ecuador. Tábara continued to paint with a vigorous spirit in his home town of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Barcelona is considered Tábara's home away from home.

After living and painting in Europe for over nine years Tábara felt that there was not enough being done in the name of Latin American Modern art so in 1964 he returned to Ecuador in search of a new aesthetic. Tábara reconnected to his roots through the Latin American current of "Ancestralism", which finds inspiration in pre-Hispanic cultures that inhabited the continent (third stage). Tábara is the first artist to use the Pre-Columbian motif as a search for a new aesthetic.

In 1963, Tábara represented Ecuador together with Humberto Moré and Theo Constanté at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris for the Third Biennial of Paris. By 1964, Tábara's work was being shown throughout Latin America, as well as Lausanne, Milan, Grenchen, Vienna, Lisbon, Munich, Barcelona, Madrid, Washington, New York and Paris.

Tábara held his first US exhibit in 1954 at the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C. In 1955, the Ecuadorian government offered Tábara a scholarship to study at the Escuela Official de Bellas Artes de Barcelona. Tábara's work was welcomed with great success in Spain and Tábara befriended surrealist André Breton and Joan Miró. By 1959, Tábara's work had gained a great deal of international attention. André Breton asked Tábara to represent Spain in the Homage to Surrealism Exhibition, among the works of Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Eugenio Granell. Miró enthusiastically praised Tábara's work and presented Tábara with an original piece of his artwork which Tábara has long treasured.

In 1946, Tábara attended the School of Fine Arts in Guayaquil and was mentored by German artist Hans Michaelson and Guayaquilean artist, Luis Martinez Serrano. In 1951, Tábara finished mastering the fundamentals and left art school. Tábara's early works typically depicted grotesque characters, marginalized peoples of Guayaquil, prostitutes, and some portraits. By 1953, Tábara began to paint more abstract images.

Luis Enrique Tábara (21 February 1930 – 25 January 2021) was a master Ecuadorian painter and teacher representing a whole Hispanic pictorial and artistic culture.

Tábara was greatly influenced by the Constructivist Movement, founded around 1913 by Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin, which made its way into Europe and Latin America by way of Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García and Parisian/Ecuadorian painter Manuel Rendón. Torres Garcia and Rendón both made an enormous impact on Latin American artists such as Tábara, Aníbal Villacís, Theo Constanté, Oswaldo Viteri, Estuardo Maldonado, Luis Molinari, Félix Arauz and Carlos Catasse, to name a few.