Painter, sculptor and muralist, Alceu Ribeiro trained with Joaquín Torres-García from 1939, thanks to a scholarship that allowed him to settle with his brother, also an artist, in Montevideo. He studied with the master for ten years, until the latter's death in 1949, and during his student years his work was already recognised with several prizes at the Montevideo National Salon in 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943 and 1945.

The following year, in 1946, he made himself known in Paris through the Muestra de Pintura Moderna Uruguaya held there. In 1949 he founded the workshop El Molino, which he converted into the centre of Montevideo's intelligentsia, and that same year he carried out his first commission for a mural pa...