Juan Lopezdabdoub
- Art Department
Born and raised in El Salvador, Central America, Juan Lopezdabdoub moved to Canada with his family in 1991 leaving a Salvadorian civil war behind. In 1993, he entered the University of Manitoba where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts-Honours degree. He is the recipient of two University of Manitoba Gold Medals, a Shanski Fine Arts Bursary, two Heins Jordan Awards and an undergraduate scholarship for the highest standing in the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Between 1980 and 1992, El Salvador was torn apart by a civil war fought between the Salvadoran military dictatorship and a unified leftist opposition guerrilla movement known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The twelve-year struggle claimed 75,000 lives, left 8,000 more missing and a million each homeless and exiled. Not surprisingly, some of the most compelling images in Lopezdabdoub's body of work deal with war and its toll. Still, the artist is not specially concerned with the concrete and tangible horror of bullets and guns but rather with the effect that, in a metaphysical sense, particular events have in people's psyche. His work is a universal and humanistic form of art that evaluates events according to the consequences they have for the human experience. His paintings are critical visual commentaries on pressing economical, political, cultural and social issues. The voices of the people who inhabit his canvases are denunciatory pointing to the terror and other feelings or emotions associated with existing in dysfunctional and destructive environments.
Between 1980 and 1992, El Salvador was torn apart by a civil war fought between the Salvadoran military dictatorship and a unified leftist opposition guerrilla movement known as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The twelve-year struggle claimed 75,000 lives, left 8,000 more missing and a million each homeless and exiled. Not surprisingly, some of the most compelling images in Lopezdabdoub's body of work deal with war and its toll. Still, the artist is not specially concerned with the concrete and tangible horror of bullets and guns but rather with the effect that, in a metaphysical sense, particular events have in people's psyche. His work is a universal and humanistic form of art that evaluates events according to the consequences they have for the human experience. His paintings are critical visual commentaries on pressing economical, political, cultural and social issues. The voices of the people who inhabit his canvases are denunciatory pointing to the terror and other feelings or emotions associated with existing in dysfunctional and destructive environments.