Manuel Felguérez

(Zacatecas, 1928 – Mexico City, 2020)

Author's artworks

20th-21st Century Mexican

Felguérez’s practice as an artist, teacher and researcher made him one of the most respected figures in the visual arts in Mexico in the second half of the twentieth century. As a consequence of the agrarian movement and the early death of his landowner father, his family was forced to move to Mexico City. There, in the Boy Scouts, the young Felguérez befriended the future author Jorge Ibargüengoitia. In 1947, they both embarked on a trip to Europe. Felguérez decided to become a painter while looking at the work of Turner (1775-1851). A brief four-month stay at the San Carlos Academy convinced him to pursue his art training outside academic orthodoxy. He would return to Paris on two occasions: in 1949-1951, when the work of Jean Arp (1886-1966) led him towards abstraction and to the studio of the cubist artist Ossip Zadkine (1890-1967), who taught him to sculpt; and in the mid-1950s with a scholarship, in a sojourn marked by his affair with his future wife, the painter Lilia Carrillo (1930-1974), whose demise in 1974 left him a widower.

Once resettled in Mexico, he exhibited at the Antonio Souza, Juan Martín and Proteo galleries, which promoted artists opposed to the declining
and made up what came to be known as the
: José Luis Cuevas (1934-2017), Vicente Rojo (1932-2021), Pedro Coronel (1922-1985) and Fernando García Ponce (1933-1987), among others. Felguérez played a major role in the raging controversy that broke out between realists and abstractionists, and in many of the seminal exhibitions of the time: Salón Esso, Confrontación 66, the three editions of Salón Independiente and the São Paulo Biennial, where he won the grand prix in 1975.

Manuel Felguérez’s public work can be seen in several cities in Mexico and other countries; it is also on view in universities, corporation headquarters and private residences. Felguérez’s monumental and abstract forms are characterized by a geometrical sense of order combined with real passion that overspills the immaculate outline of the forms and takes over the surrounding space. From his intervention in the no-longer-existing Cine Diana with Mural de hierro (1962) to Agenda 2030 (2018), at the UN headquarters in New York, his public works make use of recycled materials (scrap metal, industrial waste, mirrors and oyster shells, for instance), which he employed in a synthesis of sculpture and painting. Felguérez continued working on numerous projects right up until his very end. Though he lived for a short time only in his home state, Zacatecas has dedicated a museum to his life and legacy.