Glowing and iridescent violets and blues on a textured canvas ground are a perfect foil for two abstracted figures in artist Rufino Tamayo’s oil and sand on canvas, Dos Figuras en Azul, which exemplifies the artist’s method of abstract figuration during the 1970’s.
This fantastic, mid-career painting embodies the artist’s distinctly Mexican œuvre of work during that period. Known for its unique individualism, symbolic media and grandeur, Tamayo’s work contains colorful abstraction and graphic imagery intended to symbolize Mexico’s indigenous roots.
Using depth and texture to illustrate the dialectics of joy and despair in his subject matter, Tamayo’s work draws attention to the conflict between nature and the universal man.
“… His attitude is a profession of faith rather than æsthetics: painting is a way of touching reality. It does not give us the sensation of reality: it confronts us with the reality of sensations. The most immediate and most direct sensations: colors, forms, touch…” —Octavio Paz
[from: An Art of Configurations, Rufino Tamayo: Myth & Magic, Guggenheim Foundation, New York 1979]
One of the most renowned Mexican artists who contributed to International Modernism, Rufino Tamayo had a prolific career that lasted seven decades. During that time he travelled between Mexico City, New York and Paris. Unlike his Latin American contemporaries, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Tamayo’s works were based on the idea of “arte puro” (pure art) and not on concepts of Social Realism. However, Tamayo was often dubbed the “Fourth Great One”.
The work was one of a hundred paintings exhibited in: Tamayo: Peintures, 1960-1974, at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville Paris in 1974-1975 as well as at a second solo exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi of Florence, Italy
Small
Height: 29.8 x Width: 40 x cm. / Height: 11.75 x Width: 15.75 x in.
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Currently, this artwork is not for sale. For exhibition only.