In 1936, Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros relocated to New York City to found the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, a collective enterprise aimed at raising the caliber of the avant-garde through modern techniques. While in New York, Siqueiros began painting with Duco, a brand of nitrocellulose paint then used almost exclusively in the commercial automotive industry.

Likely one of Rufino Tamayo’s first Mixografia prints, this chromolithographic still life is anything but static. A technique Tamayo developed in the late 1930s when he found traditional methods of etching and lithography boring, Mixografia abandoned the usual metal plates or smoothed stones on which printmakers drew their designs.