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Enjoy the perfect plan for this fall with art and culture at the Palace of Fine Arts, one of the most beautiful and iconic spaces in our country, and contemplate the works that celebrate the career of one of the top exponents of abstract art in Mexico, in the framework of his first death anniversary with the exhibition, Francisco Castro Leñero; A logic of beauty.
The Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts presents the exhibition Francisco Castro Leñero. A Logic of Beauty, thanks to the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (Inbal) through the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts (MPBA). The exhibition aims to commemorate and analyze the artistic production of Castro Leñero through a crafted curation of pieces based on the investigation of geometry and experimentation from abstraction.
This exhibition displays over 60 works from private and institutional collections, including paintings, engravings, drawings, and three-dimensional objects. In this, four thematic cores of the different plastic facets of the artist get validated. Francisco Castro Leñero (1954-2022) emerged on the Mexican art scene at the end of the seventies with a proposal based on rectilinear patterns and sober chromatic scales that opened the way to an exclusively visual perception without explicit references to life or empirical reality. In Castro Leñero’s words, If there is no search for beauty, the viewer is denied a fundamental experience. Beauty holds the possibility of being moved.
The exhibition curator is Sylvia Navarrete Bouzard, a renowned Mexican researcher and writer who has published several books, worked as an art critic, and held various public positions in renowned cultural institutions, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca or the Museum of Modern Art.
The exhibition condenses five decades of artistic production into four thematic cores. The first, Summary of a Trajectory, offers a general and introductory vision of Castro Leñero’s work based on a selection of representative works from different periods, where a balance arises between the early and the most recent pictorial creations.
Visitors will be able to appreciate the evolution of Castro Leñero’s work over time, from the assemblages of the 1980s to the three-dimensional sculptures and mandalas.
Matter, wood, and Ladies: 1980-2000, the second core, exhibits the artist’s first creative stage, where the urban landscape intertwined with the artificial construction altered by the influence of nature, rain, time, and human intervention. After the 1985 earthquake, the artist transformed his plastic language to conceptualize in gridded geometric segments that refer to tiles or board game boards.
In Displacements, vibrations, and Curves: 2000-2021, the consolidation of the Maestro artistic language is evident, highlighting the expressive value of the square and the tensions generated by the lines. The common threads in this stage are the eloquence of space, the poetics of light, musical rhythms, and chromatic experimentation inspired by the study of Velázquez and Rembrandt. Since 2000, the focus has oriented toward a looser, but always deliberate, use of structural relationships, in which the normative of the composition gives way to the organic, with exuberant color combinations.
In the last core, The Master’s Papers, preparatory works, and pieces on paper are exhibited, including studies of figurative sketches and thematic variations through drawing, engraving, and painting sequences. In the center of the room stands out a monumental painting made by the artist as part of the AKASO project, an evocation of the murals produced by Mexico for the Osaka Universal Exhibition in 1970.
This exhibition has been possible thanks to loans from 17 private collections and the collections of the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca, Museo Amparo, Museum of Modern Art, Inbal, and Museo Jumex.
The Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts would like to express special gratitude to the Jenkins Foundation for its valuable support in creating the catalog that joins this exhibition, which significantly enriches the collection.
Francisco Castro Leñero. A Logic of Beauty is open to the public from September 14, from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. In addition to the exhibition, a program of guided tours and parallel activities will be available to enrich the visiting experience.
Learn more at the Palace of Fine Arts Museum.
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Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes.
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