calendario eventi  :: 

X

8/7/2005

South of the border

Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles

Latin American Works of Art

Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, two artists who worked with the Surrealists in Europe, are featured in our show. The two women moved to Mexico City in the 1940s, where they were welcomed by the community of European artist-exiles that gathered there. A number of their paintings presented in our show reflect an interest in alchemy and the occult with their renderings of mysterious figures and fantastic animals. Surrealism is carried forward by Roberto Montenegro’s painting Horse in Surreal Landscape and his lithograph Tree Woman. Montenegro was a friend and mentor to Rufino Tamayo, whose double drawing Nubes (Clouds) was proposed as a costume design for the National Ballet of Mexico City.

We will also feature the abstractions of Carlos Merida and Joaquin Torres-Garcia, two early pioneers of Latin American Modernism who developed their painting techniques among the avant-garde community of Paris in the early 20th Century. Merida’s brightly colored geometric abstractions of the 1960s and 1970s have roots in the Mayan concept of “sacred geometry”. Torres-Garcia developed his own theory of art, Universalismo Constructivo (Universal Constructivism). In Formas, his drawing of 1933 Torres-Garcia sought to incorporate the human experience in his art through a geometric language.

Raising social consciousness of the conditions of the native working class people of Mexico, both past and present, is a goal of many of these artists. Diego Rivera’s watercolors celebrate manual laborers, in his monumental renderings of agricultural workers. Jean Charlot’s lithograph, The Great Builders, depicts the ancient laborers of the pyramids at Chichen Itza, Raul Anguiano’s lithograph, Surgery, presents an indigenous woman of central Mexico incising her injured foot, while Jose Clemente Orozco’s lithograph, Masses, confronts the viewer with a teeming crowd of shouting figures. The TALLER DE GRAFICA POPULAR was started in the mid-1930s by socialist leaning artists who created politically charged prints. That philosophy is evident in Angel Bracho’s Victoria!, a poster created in 1945 celebrating victory over Germany and Fascism and in Isadoro Ocampo’s 1' de julio...., that depicts a 1936 strike of truck drivers that was violently crushed by the Mexican government.

Contemporary Chicano artists carry forward the tradition of Latin printmaking. Carlos Almaraz and Frank Romero, two members of “Los Four” (exhibited at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974), influence the vibrant Chicano art scene of Los Angeles.

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 9 - 2 to 5pm

Image: Rufino Tamayo, “Demi Poisson”, 1969, color lithograph, 20 1/2 x 27 1/4 inches

TOBEY C. MOSS GALLERY
7321 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036
Hours, Tuesday - Saturday, 11am-5pm

stampa

permanent link