Noticias
50 works are on display
The MAM shines with Rufino Tamayo´s prodigious and colorful painting
June 07, 2017The Museum of Modern Art (MAM, for its acronym in Spanish) will present on Saturday, June 10th onwards, the retrospective: Rufino Tamayo, ecstasy of color, 41 years after the last great exhibition dedicated to the Oaxacan artist and 26 years after his death.
The exhibition is made up of 50 works, of which 34 belong to the MAM collection with different techniques: 45 oil paintings, pastel and gouache; four drawings in graphite, charcoal and sanguine and a mixography.
The exhibition is divided in three thematic pillars: In search of the archetype, From Mexico to the Cosmos, and For a geometry of the space; and shows the experimentation, dynamism and search in the field of geometry and abstraction by the artist.
According to Sylvia Navarrete, curator of the exhibition, the intention is to recover Tamayo not as the canonical figure or lifeless.
"We want to show that he was not only a painter who renewed the history of Mexican art, but also knew how to keep up with what was happening around him and in a movement of experimentation”, he explained on Wednesday June 7th during a tour for mass media.
The director of MAM also explained that we are facing a prodigy of color that managed to find his own language in which he resorts to a certain pre-Hispanic esthetic, and transfigures its architecture and sculpture to revitalize it in a contemporary language.
The works shown are part of the collection of this building, with a total of 34. Of the remaining, 13 come from private collections and three from the collection of the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo.
Among them, the detachable mural Tribute to the Indian race (1952) stands out, which after 20 years is shown to the public. It is a horseback painting between figuration and abstraction "which represents all the ways that Tamayo traveled to reach that expression, in which the human figure responds to a dynamism”, said Sylvia Navarrete.
On the other hand, one of the few political caricatures made by the painter, titled The Leader (1973), in which a political figure barks while it is applauded by a multitude of rabbits whose hands make the sign of victory.
Another one of the main works of the exhibition is Sleeping musicians (1950), one of the more well-known paintings of the artist whose sketch is attached to it.
The general director of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA, for its acronym in Spanish), Lidia Camacho, stressed that Rufino Tamayo separated from the rhetoric of the muralists and their proselytizing lines to represent an independent model for the young generation of culture.
"Tamayo lived dedicated to painting as an intimate creative experience. He was always guided by a sense of color and a passion for Mexican archeology, he was convinced that the canvas is an inexhaustible field of experimentation to extract all the magnetism, to fuse the figure and the abstraction in an evocative expression of the infinite”.
Throughout the exhibition you can see both early and late paintings in which the path of the Oaxacan painter is perceived towards a mature language.
There is also a more intimate esthetic, linked to dreams and an inner search, in which Tamayo develops to a science of color until he arrives at monochromatic paintings.
Rufino Tamayo, éxtasis del color, permanecerá en el Museo de Arte Moderno hasta el 27 de agosto. A partir del 23 de noviembre será exhibida en el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (Marco), como parte de los festejos por su 25 aniversario.
Rufino Tamayo, ecstasy of color, will be on view in the Museum of Modern Art until August 27th. From November 23rd it will be on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey (Marco), as part of the festivities of its 26th anniversary.
Mexico,Distrito Federal
