Elias Rivera is a painter whose work both creates timeless images and displays virtuosity of technique. Born and educated in New York City, Rivera studied at The Art Students League in the late 1950s and continued to work in New York until 1982 when he relocated to Santa Fe. During his long career, Rivera has painted the human drama as it unfolds in settings as varied as civil-rights demonstrations, subways, rodeos, and the marketplaces of Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. His classical training and Old Master technique invoke a true narrative quality rarely seen in contemporary realist painting.
This long-awaited, lavishly illustrated monograph spans forty years of Rivera's work and is the first to document his most recent large-scale paintings of unique marketplace, street scenes, and the people who inspire them. Regardless of the particulars of culture, place and time that appear in each painting, Elias Rivera consistently captures the essence of humanity.