Francisco Abril de Vivero†
10 Octobre 1919 - 29 Octobre 2004
Artist history

In the book "Painting and Painters of Peru", Guillermo Tello G. (Lima 1997) he refers about the painter Francisco Abril de Vivero's in the following terms:

He was born in La Punta, Callao, the 10 of October of 1919. Son of the prestigious diplomat and writer Pablo Abril de Vivero and nephew of not less prestigious Xavier Abril. He lived during twenty years, in two stages, in Paris, where he knew the illustrious Peruvian poets César Vallejo and César Moro, having made a fruitful artistic and intellectual activity.

In Lima, he had carried out studies in the National School of Arts, under the trusteeship of Professor Carlos Quispez Asin, being director Ricardo Grau. By his admirable dowries as intellectual and artist, he was named in the same school, first, junior instructor and soon, senior instructor of Artistic Anatomy and Design: having himself carried out later like President of the Educational Council, among other important positions. President of the Peruvian Association of Plastic Arts, he was chosen during two periods as well as representing Peru in the First Latin American Encounter of Education through the Art, in Rio de Janeiro and before the Biennial of Sao Paulo, in Brazil.

He has numerous publications, like journalist, on the cultural problematic of the country. He has participated with remarkable success in numerous individual and collective exhibitions. In 1979, he was named to carry out the honourable position of Director of the National Institute of Culture, having given a great impulse to all the artistic manifestations in the country. (From: "El Comercio", Lima 4 and 11 of January and 14 of May of 1979).

• The nature of his production, oriented mainly to the portrait, maintains him away from the galleries, where he exposes sporadically. With regard to an individual sample that exhibited a serial entitled "Imaginary Portraits", the eminent Art Critic Carlos Rodriguez Saavedra has written what follows "In these pictures, the knowledge or the intuition of the spirit of the model, the elimination of the pose and the beginning of the imagination has come together to recreate, with penetration and technical naturalness, the existential truth of treaties".
  
• Several of his portraits are in the gallery of the Legislative Palace and, of course, in particular houses.
  
• In the 80's, by the way, he incurred the processing of the urban landscape.
  
• He has culminated a series that has by reason the imaginary representation of great masters painting their autoportraits.