Francisco Brugnoli (b. 1935) is a visual artist. He is also a teacher at the Facultad de Artes de la Universidad de Chile and was, at one time, the director of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago. His work explores the resources and paradigms of Pop Art through installations and collages. In 1974, he co-founded the Taller de Artes Visuales (TAV) with Raúl Bustamante, Alfredo Carrete, María Virginia Errázuriz, Carlos Donaire, Luz Donoso, and Gustavo Poblete. This studio, which taught printmaking, drawing, and graphic arts, was started (a year after the coup d’état) in response to the government’s intervention and cancellation of visual arts classes at Chilean universities, as decreed by the authoritarian policies of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Carlos Hermosilla (1905–1991) was one of the greatest artists in the Chilean printmaking scene. He worked in a variety of media to explore a number of things, such as highbrow and popular forms of expression, the countryside around Valparaíso (his hometown), and peasants and workers. His media included drawings, oil paintings and mixed techniques, etchings, woodcuts, lithography, linoleum prints, and zinc chalcography, to name just a few. A considerable part of Hermosilla’s work consisted of portraits of nationally known figures in the fields of politics, literature, and art. He was hugely influential in the training of printmakers all over Chile, and spent many years as a teacher at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Viña del Mar. One of his major accomplishments was the founding of Taller de Artes Gráficas de Viña del Mar (TAGVM) in 1939, during Pedro Aguirre Cerda’s populist administration. Three decades later, in 1972, President Salvador Allende, the leader of the Unidad Popular, acknowledged Hermosilla as an “Artist of the People.”
