With over eight decades of artistic production, Ermilo Torre Gamboa (Mérida, México, 1924) was one of the first Yucatecan artists to receive academic training in Europe. He emigrated to Madrid and enrolled in the “Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando”, where he worked in a workshop painting porcelain and restoring old paintings support himself. He lived and studied for a time in Paris and Florence.

 

During his stay in Spain he made reproductions of great masterpieces in the “Museo del Prado”. Upon his return to Mexico in the early 1950s, he brought some of these reproductions, as well as original works, and he made his first solo exhibition.

 

The Yucatecan painter moved to Mexico City, where he made friends with Álvaro Carrillo Gil, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, a situation that allowed him to experience first-hand the changes in Mexico at that time. Back in Mérida he developed an interesting stage as a portraitist, without leaving aside his own research and the creation of personal and intimate work.

 

Portrait painter, master of masters, recipient of countless awards and distinctions, he has never lost the kindness and simplicity that characterizes him, as he still considers himself “apprentice of painter”. Today, at 97 years of age, it is still common to see him painting in the entrance of his house in Mérida at 7:00 a.m.