Printed in Paris at the International Guild of Amateur Printers in 1950, Rufino Tamayo’s lithograph meditates on one of his often revisited themes: the interaction of man and bird. The avian motif recurs in the Mexican artist’s oeuvre, signaling both peace and aggression.

Printed in Paris at the International Guild of Amateur Printers in 1950, Rufino Tamayo’s lithograph meditates on one of his often revisited themes: the interaction of man and bird. The avian motif recurs in the Mexican artist’s oeuvre, signaling both peace and aggression.

This color lithograph by Mexican printmaker Rufino Tamayo demonstrates the artist’s return to obscured, mysterious, and ominous abstracted figures in his work. Here Tamayo prints a perfectly symmetrical man, standing prominently in the center of the image. The vibrant orange-red background contrasts with the rusty, hardly decipherable, yet partitioned limbs of the man’s body.

Having returned from Paris to his ancestral Mexico, established painter, printmaker, and muralist Rufino Tamayo designed and executed a series of prints sharing a common theme: the female body. In this series, his skill in lithography, abstraction, and color application coalesces on paper to form a vibrantly savage study of the female form.

In the 1960s, Brazilian Sergio de Camargo was working and exhibiting in Paris, where he was an active member of an artist collective, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV). A main purpose of the collective was to experiment in the creation of optical and kinetic sculptures under shared formal and theoretical practices.

"I don't try to use many colors because I consider it unnecessary. With two or three colors at the most you can express more than plenty."—Rufino Tamayo

 

This color lithograph is one of a series of similar studies by Mexican painter and printmaker Rufino Tamayo that explore the complex relationship between color and the abstracted human figure.

One of Rufino Tamayo’s many color lithographs printed in Paris, this impression demonstrates the artist’s move from his traditional representative treatment of women to a highly abstracted female form, heavily influenced by Cubism. While working in Mexico, Tamayo began depicting female nudes with a matronly, indigenous, and allegorical identity.