Mexico

Art from Mexico, from Olmec, Teotihuacan, Maya and Aztec works to colonial Baroque, the muralists, Frida Kahlo and contemporary artists.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Mexico are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

Mexico's ancient cultures built on a colossal scale: the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, the sculpted temples of Maya Palenque, and Aztec stone carvings such as the fierce earth goddess Coatlicue. After the Spanish conquest, Indigenous and European craft merged in gilded church altarpieces, tin-glazed Talavera pottery from Puebla and casta paintings that recorded colonial ideas of race.

In the late 19th century, José Guadalupe Posada printed skeleton cartoons for the popular press. After the Revolution, the government commissioned murals, and Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros filled public buildings with history. Frida Kahlo painted herself in The Two Fridas (1939), Rufino Tamayo favoured pre-Hispanic colour, and Leonora Carrington built a Surrealist world in Mexico City. Manuel Álvarez Bravo photographed the everyday with poetic strangeness, and Luis Barragán's houses used bright walls and water. Gabriel Orozco and Damián Ortega belong to a later, conceptual generation.