Rosa Elena Curruchich is considered the first woman painter in the city of San Juan Comalapa in the Chimatenango department of Guatemala. She taught herself to paint in the mid-1970s, documenting through her meticulously detailed and precise paintings, the traditional customs, religious festivities, familial links, work and artisanal traditions, such as candle making, baking, kite making and weaving. Her work is characterised by the attention she brings to women’s roles within Indigenous social structures.

R. E. Curruchich was born into a family of painters. She was the granddaughter of Andrés Curruchich, one of the most important painters of Comalapa, who enjoyed international recognition in the 1950s. Yet her pictorial work was not well received due to suspicion and prejudice towards women painters: within her community, painting was considered a masculine tradition, leading to many moments of rejection and solitude. Her painting’s miniature format is due to the fact that much of her work had to be done in secret and with a high degree of caution.

Her first exhibition was in 1979, at the French Institute in the city of Guatemala. In the years that followed R. E. Curruchich maintained the miniature format as her signature style, allowing her work to be discreetly transported during the Guatemalan Civil War. On each work, R. E. Curruchich included a small text describing the painted characters and explaining their actions.

Before creating work more suited to the tastes of tourists, her paintings were documents that reclaimed the affective and political value of the parts of social life not often represented by male painters. Her work reveals the personal history and the way in which Indigenous women practise political actions through communal work, setting it apart from liberal, Western feminism.