Rina Melanie Lazo Wasem
(1923-2019)

Rina Melanie Lazo Wasem (1923-2019) was born in Guatemala City. Her father is the doctor Víctor Arturo Lazo Midence (1890-1983) and daughter of Melanie Wasem Hurtarte (1896-1990). She began her studies in the workshop of Guatemalan artist Julio Urruela Vásquez (1910–1990), creator of the murals of the National Palace; later she enters to the Academy of Fine Arts, where she develops her artistic vocation with pencil, drawing, inks, watercolor and oil painting, achieving a prize with the work of the easel “Naturaleza muerta con Xipe” (1946) and a scholarship to continue studies at the School of Painting and Sculpture "La Esmeralda" in Mexico City, where she joined the Mexican plastic arts, when she was selected to work as an assistant of teacher Diego Rivera.

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She learned from him the fresco technique creating several murals in the Mexican Republic, with socio-political themes. She was invited to make a replica of Bonampak’s murals, located in the Museum of Anthropology of Mexico, for which she documented directly from the originals in the lacandon jungle.

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Her pictorial skill extended to woodcut, linoleum, lithography, and etching. She worked together with the artist Arturo García Bustos (1926-2017), with whom she married in 1949 and had a daughter, Rina García Lazo.

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Her work shows socio-political themes, landscapes, still lifes and, on a smaller scale, portraits, through figurative naturalistic visual language.

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Her preference was the large-format work in fresco, which she leaves as the only testimony in her country of origin “Tierra Fértil de Guatemala”.