Blanton Museum of Art - Tres figuras [Three Figures]

Tres figuras [Three Figures]

1933
20th century
45 cm x 29.2 cm (17 11/16 in. x 11 1/2 in.)

Carlos Mérida (Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1891 - 1985, Mexico City) Primary

Object Type: drawing

Artist Nationality: Latin America, Guatemalan

Medium and Support: Gouache and ink on paper

Credit Line: Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Thomas Cranfill, 1978

Accession Number: 1978.89

Born in Guatemala, Carlos Mérida lived in Europe in the 1920s and then settled in Mexico. A modernist, he drew from a rich variety of sources, including his indigenous heritage and the work of surrealist painters he met abroad. In the early 1930s, Mérida developed a simplified figurative style that he combined with fluid fields of color. Here, he presents the ambiguous outlines of three stocky figures with missing limbs, which could be read as mannequins, classical sculptures, or ancient Mexican figurines. They blend with the painterly background as the soft white and gray tones simultaneously give solidity to the figures and engulf them.

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figurative

male nude

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This object is a member of the following portfolios:

Guatemalan Art