Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays
"In all of Felguerez's work, not a single one of these successive transformations is gratuitous, nor can it be considered mere formal experimentation. As the remarkable unity of his work shows, the artist has doubtless attempted continually to enrich his expressive means, but he has done so with an absolute faithfulness to his original vision. Each one of his explorations and discoveries is determined by the supreme necessity of arriving, through color or volume, on the canvas or in stone, at that perfection of form whereby objects suddenly acquire meaning, revealing to us a truth contained within them, represented by them. That is why the experimentation in Felguerez's work is never merely formal, never sufficient for itself, but is rather a way of forcing his expressive means, of obliging them to go beyond, to transcend themselves in order to make possible the encounter with this form full of natural meaning." Juan Garcia Ponce, excerpted from Manuel Felguerez.
Published by RM/INBA/Instituto Zacatecano de Cultura. Text by Jaime Moreno Villareal, et al.
This beautiful volume presents the public works of one of the greatest Mexican artists of the second half of the 20th Century, Manuel Felguérez (born 1928), from his early work seeking to break from the tradition of the Mexican muralist tradition to his monumental collaborations on the campus of UNAM to his most recent works in this century.
Published by Editorial RM. Text by Dore Ashton, Juan Villoro, Jorge Reynoso, Alberto González, Angélica García.
A painter of rare independent vision, with an oeuvre that now stretches back a half-century, Manuel Felguérez (born 1928) is without doubt one of Mexico’s most outstanding artists. His abstract paintings of the 1950s and 1960s presented expressively worked surfaces and a scratchy mark-making; later he arrived at the work for which he is best known, abstractions of a more classical bent, that evoke the cylindrical geometries of Fernand Léger and Francis Picabia. But from the start, Felguérez’s painting has been characterized by its earthy feel and warm hues. This superbly produced monograph includes essays on Felguérez by Dore Ashton, who reflects on the artist’s influence both in Mexico and abroad, Mexican writer Juan Villoro, who supplies a personal portrait, and analyses of the work by Jorge Reynoso and Alberto González. Alongside a wealth of excellent color illustrations, this monograph provides a detailed contextualizing chronology of the artist’s life and times.
Manuel Felguerez