20th-21st Century Mexican

With considerable baggage to his credit and a refined technique that earned him an eminent place within the field of Hyperrealism in Mexico, Arturo Rivera’s painting produces a cathartic effect in the beholder.

After studying painting in the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, from 1963 to 1968, and later and photo-silkscreening at The City Lit Art School in London, he completed an internship at the Munich Kunstakademie in 1979. In 1980, following an invitation from the museographer Fernando Gamboa, Rivera returned to Mexico to exhibit for the first time in the city’s Museo de Arte Moderno. From that moment onwards he took part in many group shows in New York, Puerto Rico, Munich, Medellin, Rome, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, London, Poland and the Nordic countries, and in solo presentations in Chicago, New York and Mexico.

From 1993 to 1999 he worked as artistic creator at Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (national system of art creators), an art association belonging to FONCA (National Endowment for Culture and Arts). In 2005 he won the Grand Prix at the Beijing International Art Biennale. He died on 29 October 2020 in Mexico City.

An undercurrent of violence, at times overly explicit, runs through almost all his work; a violence impossible to disassociate from an iconoclastic and provocative character. Although he declared his admiration for Caravaggio (1571-1610), whom he considered to be the first realist painter in history, his list of “realist” painters also included Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) and Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). The modern tone of his realism has points of connection with the particular expressionism of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) and with the harrowing spirit that defined the second half of the twentieth century and indeed the twenty-first century so far.