Mexican Artist Juan Soriano Dies
 CBC Arts
| | Friends and Mexican artists stand next to the coffin of the Mexican artist Juan Soriano, during a homage in Bellas Artes Palace in Mexico City, Mexico, Saturday, Feb 11, 2006. Mexican painter and sculptor Juan Soriano, praised for an original style that a Spanish king once described as blending tradition with the vanguard and realism with visual imagination, died early Friday. He was 85. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo) |
Mexican painter and sculptor Juan Soriano, a self-described artistic rebel, has died in Mexico City.
Soriano's agent told Mexican reporters the 85-year-old artist died in a hospital where he had been admitted Jan. 25 with dehydration and pneumonia.
"He passed away right before my eyes," said the agent, Marek Keller.
Sariano was one of the last surviving members of the "Mexican School" cultural movement spawned from the 1910 Revolution. It included luminaries such as painter Frida Kahlo and Sariano's friend, writer Octavio Paz. The movement dabbled in expressionism, blossoming after the end of the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz in 1910.
"For art and culture in Mexico and the world, his loss is irreparable," said Saul Juarez, director the National Institute of Fine Arts.
Spain awarded the artist its 2005 Valazquez Plastic Arts Prize. In accepting his award, Sariano said: "I feel I have rebelled against painting itself."
Sariano's body was placed in Mexico City's Palace of Fine Arts Saturday.
One of his most famous public works is the large bronze dove sitting outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey.
Born in Guadalajara in 1920, the young Sariano moved to the capital in the 1930s, where he established friendships with other intellectuals such as Paz.
Sariano became a member of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, which opposed Nazism and Fascism in Europe and spoke out against injustices in Latin America perpetrated by the American government.
He experimented with figurative arts and the abstract, preferring portraits and self-portraits. His quest for innovation led to sculpture, first in terracotta and ceramics and later in bronze.
In his 70-year career, Sariano's works have been displayed around the world in 130 exhibits in China, Spain, France, Poland and the U.S. His first exhibit was at the Guadalajara Museum, when he was still in his teens. |
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