MEXICO CITY.- The Secretaría de Cultura presents, as part of some of the most important activities of the Dual Year Mexico- Germany, the exhibition Otto Dix Violencia y pasión a display organized by the Museo Nacional de Arte INBA (MUNAL), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO) and the Goethe-Institut Mexiko.

The exhibition, designed specifically to be presented in Mexico under the original curatorship of the Dr. Ulrike Lorenz, Director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim, has more than 160 pieces, among them paintings, engravings, watercolors and drawings are highlighted. This is the first occasion i in which a revision of all the aesthetic periods of Otto Dix is presented in Mexico. He is one of the most important German artists of the XX century.

The artist captured in his pieces, unlike any other painter of the time, ¨the century of the extremes in Europe¨ marked by the two World Wars, the culture of the Weimar Republic and the German political division after 1945.

Obsessed with portraying his reality, Dix encompassed a great diversity of styles and managed to capture a critic posture towards his epoch, expressing it through two emotions: violence and passion. His experimentation with the artistic vanguard and his experiences during the war, allowed him to find his own plastic language thus placing him as one of the most important representatives of expressionism and the new German objectivity.

The exhibition is divided in seven thematic cores which offer a comprehensive gaze of Otto Dix’s production, where the Mexican audience will have the opportunity to know the legacy of an artist who lived the traumatic experiences of the war; it will also generate as well a reflection on a very important period of the German history.

According with the curator of the exhibition ¨Dix’s art answers questions which are still unanswered, therefore he is still a current artist. His work is a testimony and a commentary of what he was living, his art has a brutality that shocks us but awakens us at the same time.¨

The exhibition offers the Mexican public a wide panorama of the diverse techniques and artistic styles that the German painter explored throughout his life. The three organizing institutions managed to sum more than 160 pieces of diverse collections such as: Kunstsammlung Gera (Gera, Germany), Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas (Kansas, U.S.), ifa (Institut Ffür Auslandsbeziehungen) (Stuttgart, Germany), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Canada), Leopold-Hoesch-Museum (Düren, Germany), Saint Louis Art Museum and the valuable support of the Fundación Otto Dix collection (Vaduz, Liechtenstein) among others.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalog of 316 pages, in which the curator describes the life and work of the painter; as well as the thematic cores of the exhibition which encompass the stylistic diversity of Dix and the recurrent interests in his work like war, portrait, nudes and Berlins' society.

Before its arrival to the Museo Nacional de Arte, Otto Dix. Violencia y Pasión was exhibited in the MARCO museum at Monterrey from June 17 to September 18.