MEXICO CITY.- The Museo Nacional de Arte brings together 180 pieces from its holdings, private collections and commodatum agreement made up of various disciplines and techniques such as painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, feathers and mosaics produced in Mexico by national and international artists from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries.
The exhibit shows three historic moments of plastic production – starting from the process of creation, reception up to the consumption of art – which form the museum's collection: the New Spain period, the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The presence of two contemporary artworks are there to activate reflection nodes of the exhibit: history painting in New Spain by Mariana Castillo Deball and the relationship between the creative energy and the transformation of matter present in the artwork of Gerardo Murillo – known as "Dr. Atl " – in dialogue with a piece of Gabriel Orozco.
With the arrival of European artistic languages to the New World new techniques and compositional solutions emerged, as well as a new painting genres – such as portrait, landscape, history painting and quotidian life scenes –, that novohispano artists adopted and adapted to their artistic practices, yet most of the paintings remained liturgical and devotional in nature.
The nineteenth century is essential to Mexican history because it was fundamental to the nation’s definition. But it is also the end of workshop production and guild hierarchies, and the beginning of a severe taste featuring serene proportions with roots in the European interpretations of Classic Antiquity and promoted by the artists of the former Academy of San Carlos, itself an institution and a centralist seat of official taste.
The twenty’s decades saw a increasing questioning of the academic institution and a number of different European artistic avant-garde languages were incorporated to the pictorial language of the new generation of artists. Their artistic production reflected the preoccupations of a changing society that demanded new codes with which to identify. Gerardo Murillo (“Dr. Atl”), David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera, along with other artists with which they shared aesthetic affinities, ventured into topics related to progress and science. This determined modern Mexican art.
Through a careful selection and research of the museum's collection, the museum curators Paulina Bravo, Ariadna Patiño, Victor Rodríguez and Abraham Villavicencio, seek to revalue more than a half of the art masterpieces that have not been recently exposed because they have been sheltered in the storage of the museum or constantly participated in exhibitions. To everyone´s delight, this exibit is an exercise that uses aesthetic appreciation to elicit interest in knowing and recognizing the collection that makes up the museum.
Moreover, this exhibition is part of the curatorial renewal program of the permanent exhibition of the museum. The first step of this process was to reorganize and give the famous landscape painter José María Velasco a new place at the center of the building hall. The director of the Museo Nacional de Arte, Agustín Arteaga, explains that "the introduction of professional management systems for holdings and eviction of wineries to remodel them involved reviewing piece by piece of the collection" and confirmed "the absolute necessity of renewing the display of the permanent exhibition”. This explains that "the significance of this project lays in the revitalization of the permanent galleries of the museum, where the public can rediscover the importance, beauty, and significance of the masterpiece´s appealing power as well as the emotional strength of Mexican art”.
