This exhibition was curated by Andrew Dempsey and organized by the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes in Mexico, with the assistance of the British Council. The exhibition introduced a Mexican audience to the work of eight figurative artists – David Bomberg, Francis Bacon, William Coldstream, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach and Euan Uglow – of whom only Bacon had previously been shown in any depth in Mexico. The exhibition focused on a particular strength in 20th century British painting, the intense gaze (or mirage fuerte) which this group of English painters had brought to a range of subject matter, from portraits to the nude or naked figure and landscape. The exhibition contained loans from national, regional and foreign museums as well as private collection. A bi-lingual catalogue with texts by Teresa del Conde (Director of the Museo de Art Moderno,) and the writer William Feaver was published to accompany the exhibition. ISBN 970 18 4321 5

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.