Andres salvador artist biography

In 1937, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy bombed Guernica, a town in Northern Spain’s Basque Country, at the request of Francisco Franco’s nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War.

The aerial bombing killed hundreds of civilians, though the death toll remains disputed. It also moved Pablo Picasso to create Guernica, the large oil painting with anti-war sentiments that many consider to be his magnum opus.

Almost a century later, the horrors of war inspired another artist to get to work: Drawing from Picasso’s Guernica, San Diego-based painter Andres Valencia created an abstract scene called Invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.

In the top left corner, a single eye cries onto a Ukrainian flag. In the center, a menacing soldier with a Russian flag armband clutches a machine gun.

“Andres was in his bedroom as I was watching and listening to the news about the war in Ukraine,” the artist’s mother, Elsa Valencia