Noticias

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Until February 2019

Tamayo Museum exhibits Oaxacan masters experimentation in graphic work

September 05, 2018

Ninety percent of the graphic works that Rufino Tamayo created in 1964 during his stay at the Tamarind Lithographic Workshop, the New York experimentation workshop, are shown in the exhibition Rufino Tamayo at the Tamarind Lithographic Workshop, which will be on display until February 2019 at the building named after the Oaxacan artist.

This is a unique opportunity to admire this work, since the exhibition brings together 26 of the 28 lithographs that Tamayo made in that workshop and that are now in several collections belonging to the master's heirs, to share with the public a small chapter of Tamayo's career as an artist.

Juan Carlos Pereda, deputy director of Collections of the Tamayo Museum, pointed out that Tamayo's graphic work is very broad and parallel to his career as a painter, as it includes 75 years since he dedicated himself to graphics from the 1920s until a little before his death.

This exhibition, he said, presents the experience the painter lived in 1964 when he was invited to participate in the Tamarind Lithographic Workshop, along with other international artists, in a project to revitalize lithography, which is basically a colored drawing and had become obsolete.

José Luis Cuevas, the enfant terrible del arte, and Rufino Tamayo, the most famous creator of our country, attended from Mexico, working on a suite whose main characteristic was the renovation of lithography.

There, Tamayo experimented with many technical resources that were not considered possible within classical lithography and in fact incorporated the lack of expertise, which was a technical problem, as a renovating and modernizing aesthetic element in this genre emerged in the eighteenth century.

What Tamayo did in the Tamarind, according to Juan Carlos Pereda, was extraordinary because he renewed the printed graphics as well as the painting. Mexico is a country of graphic artists with great figures like Leopoldo Méndez who made an impeccable lithograph, traditional and orthodox. On the other hand, Tamayo nourishes it, enhances it and takes graphics to unsuspected places.

For example, in his graphic work all the errors and lack of expertise of the technicians in the workshops are used with great creative freedom. If the impression was stained with a touch, a trace or a drop, it was erased and Tamayo opened the possibility of incorporating those errors as a contemporary gesture, which embellish and fill each copy with eloquence.

This exhibition presents the most sophisticated graphics of Tamayo, a transparent man who lets the paper be seen as an artistic value, because it has white spaces that give a certain vibration to the work.

Also exhibited is the triptych Variaciones de un hombre made on kraft paper, immediate materials which he handled with quality, subtlety and elegance and which make this series a masterpiece of 20th century lithography.

In the series Fantasma, Tamayo did something that until then had not happened in graphics: to show the artisanal, subterranean and almost secret process of lithography, by presenting each part of the process: the initial drawing, then with texture and finally the same drawing inked in color.

Attendees will also be able to appreciate black and white lithographs that look like one ink, but actually have three: an opaque black one, a transparent one and a shiny one, where the artist also leaves visible the strokes generated by the crayon.

Rufino Tamayo at the Tamarind Lithographic Workshop also exhibits the lithographs Perfil de un hombre, Dos niños, Media luna, Personaje en una cueva, Hombre a la puerta and Cabeza de coloso, among many others, which are complemented with the oils that are permanently in the Sala Tamayo as Hombre en rojo, Dos mujeres, La gran galaxia and Sandías.

The exhibition will be open until February 2019. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see these works from different collections gathered together and of which only 20 copies were made, the same that are found in venues around the world such as the MoMA and the Albertina Museum in Vienna. The appointment is at the Tamayo Museum, located in Reforma and Gandhi.

Mexico