Daily Art Fixx

visual arts blog, painting, drawing, sculpture, illustration and more!

Remedios Varo: 1908-1963

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 Remedios VaroBorn on December 16, 1908,  in Anglés, near Girona, Spain, Remedios Varo is often overlooked as an important surrealist painter. As a child, Varo moved frequently with her family, following her father’s work as a hydraulic engineer.

Varo studied art in Madrid and moved several times between Paris and Spain where she met and exhibited with other leading Surrealist artists. She met her husband, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, in Barcelona. In 1941, Varo and Péret fled the Nazi occupation in Paris and moved to Mexico City where many other Surrealists had sought exile.

Varo separated from Péret, and initially worked as a commercial artist and illustrator in Mexico City. At the encouragement of Walter Gruen, Austrian exile and businessman, she was able to devote herself full-time to painting for the last eleven years of her life. Her first solo exhibition in Mexico at the Galería Diana in 1955 was a great success and earned her international recognition.

Varo became skilled in Surrealist Automatism, a practice where several artists work together to devise unforeseen subjects with smoke or wax on paper or canvas. Varo’s palette consisted mainly of somber oranges, light browns, shadowy grays and greens. Her paintings were carefully drawn, and depicted stories or mystic legends. She often painted heroines engaged in alchemical activities. “A delicate figure may spin and weave tiny threads transforming them into musical instruments or fashion them into paintings of small birds. The settings are often medieval tower rooms equipped with occult laboratory devices.”

Varo was influenced by artists such as Francisco Goya, El Greco, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Braque, pre-Columbian art, and the writing of André Breton. She also borrowed from Romanesque Catalan frescoes and medieval architecture, mixed nature and technology, and combined reality and fantasy to create paintings that defied time and space.

Varo was also influenced by a variety of mystic and hermetic traditions. She was interested in the ideas of C. G. Jung and the theories of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky, Helena Blavatsky, Meister Eckhart, and the Sufis. She was also fascinated with the legend of the Holy Grail, sacred geometry, alchemy and the I-Ching. She saw in each of these an avenue to self-knowledge and the transformation of consciousness.

Remedios Varo died of a heart attack at the height of her fame in her home in Mexico City on October 8, 1963. Since that time, her works have been seen in over a dozen solo exhibitions and nearly one hundred group shows worldwide.

Sources: Ciudad de la Pintura (images), Wikipedia, NMWA

Rufino Tamayo: 1899-1991

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Rufino Tamayo - Dos Perros -1941Born to a Zapotecan Indian family on August 26, 1899, Rufino Tamayo is one of Mexico’s most renowned painters. An orphan by age 12, Tamayo moved to Mexico City to live with his aunt who enrolled him in commercial school. He began taking drawing lessons in 1915 and from 1917 to 1921, he studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes.

Tamayo was appointed head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Mexico City in 1921 where he drew pre-Columbian objects in the Museum’s collection. The influence of the forms and tones of pre-Columbian ceramics are evident in Tamayo’s early works.

Unlike other well-known Mexican artists of the time such as Diego Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros, Tamayo believed in the universality of painting.  His modern style that was influenced by pre-Columbian and European art, caused him some ridicule by the popular muralists who thought that their “only path” in art should serve revolutionary ideals. Tamayo’s response was “Can you believe that, to say that ours is the only path when the fundamental thing in art is freedom! In art, there are millions of paths—as many paths as there are artists.”

Tamayo’s differences with the Mexican muralists prompted him to move to New York from 1926 to 1928 where he was influenced by the work of European artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. His painting became a fusion of the European styles of Cubism and Surrealism and his subject matter of Mexican culture.

By the 1930s Tamayo’s paintings that featured intense colours and textured surfaces had become well known.  He returned to New York, and stayed from 1936 until 1950, where he created a large body of work, taught at the Dalton School, and exhibited his work at the Valentine Gallery. Tamayo was also a prolific printmaker, and he experimented with bronze and iron sculpture.

Tamayo’s first retrospective was held at the Instituto de Bellas Artes, Mexico City in 1948. In 1950, his successful exhibition at the Venice Biennale led to international recognition.  As well, Tamayo was commissioned to design murals for the National Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City (1952-53) and for UNESCO in Paris (Prometheus Bringing Fire to Man, 1958).

Tamayo and his wife Olga lived in Paris between 1957 and 1964 before returning to Mexico City permanently in 1964.  The French government named him Chevalier and Officier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1956 and 1969.

Tamayo donated his collection of pre-Columbian art to the city of Oaxaca in 1974, founding the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Pre-Hispanic Art. As well, in 1981, he and his wife donated their collection of international art to the people of Mexico, forming the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City.

Tamayo’s work was exhibited in group and solo shows around the world including retrospectives at the São Paulo Bienal in 1977 and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979. In 1988, he received the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. Tamayo created his final painting (a self portrait), in 1989 at the age of 90 – Hombre con Flor (Man with Flower). He died in Mexico City on June 24, 1991.

Sources: Guggenheim Collection, Albright-Knox Gallery, Wikipedia, Biography.com, Images: Ciudad de la Pintura

Frida Kahlo: 1907 – 1954

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Frida Kahlo - Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird 1940Born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán Mexico, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón is one of the most internationally known Mexican painters of our time. Kahlo survived many difficult events in her life including polio around the age of six, and a bus accident that left her permanently disabled.

Kahlo did not intend to be an artist and, before her accident, was enrolled at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City in the premedical program. She began painting while recovering from her injuries that left her bedridden for over a year.

Frida’s paintings were mostly self-portraits and dealt directly with her health, physical challenges, and sexuality. With no formal training, Kahlo painted in vibrant colours and her style was influenced by the tradition of Mexican folk art and European styles including Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism.

In 1929, Kahlo met muralist Diego Rivera who was enthusiastic and supportive of her work. With their art and mutual support of Communism in common, they fell in love and despite their 20-year age difference, married the same year. Their relationship was a stormy and passionate one, filled with infidelities on both sides, the pressures of Rivera’s fame, and Kahlo’s poor health.  The couple eventually divorced, but then remarried in 1940.

Kahlo and Rivera traveled to the United States and France, where they connected with influential artists and politicians of the time. Frida had her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City in 1938 and achieved some success during the 1940s. As well, during this time, Kahlo taught art and her students became known as Los Fridos.

Kahlo produced around 200 images in her lifetime. Despite more than 30 operations, she spent her life in constant pain and had several miscarriages. Frida Kahlo died on July 13, 1954 at the age of 47. Doctors reported her death as a pulmonary embolism, relating to pneumonia, although it is also suspected that she committed suicide through an overdose.

Kahlo was described as a “self-invented Surrealist” by André Breton in 1938, but she disagreed saying “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

Sources:  Tate Museum, MOMA, Wikipedia, SFMOMA,  Artchive

Eduardo Flores: “Let Me In” @ Artishox Gallery

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Exhaling-Eduardo-Flores-BayoDAF favourite Eduardo Flores (aka BAYO) has a new exhibition entitled “Let Me In” on at Artishox Gallery in Hasselt, Belgium.

Of his work Flores says; “The way people internalize what happens in the world is unique to the individual. My work shows how this can lead a person to different internal extremes. My aim is to reflect the resulting consciousness and anxiousness through a series of questions related to one’s state of being.  My current body of work depicts the inner debate that confronts the ego as a mediator for the demands of individuality and as a self-energy that keeps fanatical vigilance over its survival.  The fundamental quest for turning individuality into a delusional existence. A series of characters immerse in a non-stop battle of energy. Positive against destructive.

“Let Me In” runs through March 4, 2012. To see more from this exhibition, visit Artishopix. Check out BAYO’s other work at Artwork.Bayo.Me.com and Behance.

Eduardo Flores (Bayo): Drawing

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More great stuff from Mexican born, Austin Texas based artist Eduardo Flores (aka Bayo). To see more of Fores work, visit  Artwork.Bayo.Me.com or check out his profile on Behance Network.