Frida Kahlo | You rain on me - I sky you, | Tu mi piovi, Io ti cielo, 1947

You rain on me - I sky you

You’re the fineness, childhood,

life - my love - little boy - old man

mother and center - blue - tender-

ness - I hand you my

universe and you live me

It is you whom I love today.

- I love you with all my loves

Frida Kahlo: “Vorrei essere ciò che ho voglia di essere”

Vorrei poter fare tutto ciò che mi piace dietro il sipario della "follia".

Allora: disporrei fiori, tutto il giorno,

dipingerei; dolore, amore e tenerezza,

riderei quanto mi pare della stupidità degli altri, e tutti direbbero: "Poverina, è pazza!"

Remedios Varo | Surrealist painter

Remedios Varo’s paintings combine Surrealist influences with a distinctive style that evokes mystical or eerie adventures.

She had a life philosophy of non-conformity and a personal story marked by dislocation and tumult.

During her childhood in Spain, Varo was influenced by her engineer father, who taught her to draw, and her strict Catholic schooling, against which she rebelled.

Leonora Carrington | Surrealist painter

Leonora Carrington, (1917-2011), British-born Mexican Surrealist artist and writer, known for her haunting, autobiographical, somewhat inscrutable paintings that incorporate images of sorcery, metamorphosis, alchemy and the occult.

Carrington was raised in a wealthy Roman Catholic family on a large estate called Crookhey Hall.

Jaime Sabines | I’m not dying of love: I’m dying of you..

I'm not dying of love: I'm dying of you

my love-dying of the love of you,

of my dire need for my skin of you,

of my soul and my mouth of you,

of the miserable wretch I am without you.

I’m dying of you and me, of both

of us, of this-

ripped to shreds, torn apart,

the two of us are dying, dying of it.

Ron Hicks

Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera | My night / La mia notte, 1939

Lettera di Frida Kahlo Diego Rivera,
Città del Messico, 12 settembre 1939
Mai spedita!

La mia notte mi strema.

Sa bene che mi manchi e tutta la sua oscurità non basta a nascondere quest’evidenza che brilla come una lama nel buio, la mia notte vorrebbe avere ali per volare fino a te, avvolgerti nel sonno e ricondurti a me.

Nel sonno mi sentiresti vicina e senza risvegliarti le tue braccia mi stringerebbero.

La mia notte non porta consiglio.

La mia notte pensa a te, come un sogno a occhi aperti.

La mia notte si intristisce e si perde.

Octavio Ocampo, 1943 | Optical Illusion painter

Octavio Ocampo (born 28 February 1943 in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico) is a Mexican surrealist painter.

He grew up in a family of designers, and studied art from early childhood.

At art school, Ocampo constructed papier mache figures for floats, altars, and ornaments that were used during carnival parades and other festivals.

In high school, Ocampo painted murals for the Preparatory School and the City Hall of Celaya.

Leonora Carrington | Surrealist sculpture

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a painter, writer, sculptor, alchemist, visionary, and was the darling of the 1930s Surrealism movement.

She never tried to be a Surrealist, but her paintings of fantastical creatures and living furniture happened to encapsulate the essence of the movement.

Jesús Helguera (1910-1971)

Mexican painter Jesús Enrique Emilio de la Helguera Espinoza, was born to spanish economist Alvaro Garcia Helguera and Maria Espinoza Escarzarga in Chihuahua, Mexico.

He lived his childhood in Mexico City and later moved to Córdoba in the state of Veracruz.

His family fled from the Mexican Revolution to Ciudad Real, Castilla la Nueva, Spain and thereafter moved to Madrid.

Jesús first gained interest in the arts during primary school and would often be found wandering the halls of the Del Prado Museum.

At the age of 14, he was admitted to the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes and later studied at the Academia de San Fernando.

Frida Kahlo | Non ti chiedo di darmi un bacio..

I'm not asking you to kiss me,

nor apologize to me when I think you're wrong.

I won't even ask you to hug me when I need it most.

I don't ask you to tell me how beautiful I am,

even if it's a lie, nor write me anything beautiful.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1887-1957)

Diego Rivera, in full Diego María Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, (born December 8, 1886, Guanajuato, Mexico—died November 25, 1957, Mexico City), Mexican painter whose bold large-scale murals stimulated a revival of fresco painting in Latin America.

A government scholarship enabled Rivera to study art at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City from age 10, and a grant from the governor of Veracruz enabled him to continue his studies in Europe in 1907. He studied in Spain and in 1909 settled in Paris, where he became a friend of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and other leading modern painters.

About 1917 he abandoned the Cubist style in his own work and moved closer to the Post-Impressionism of Paul Cézanne, adopting a visual language of simplified forms and bold areas of colour.

Mexican Art History and Sitemap

Frida Kahlo | You rain on me - I sky you, | Tu mi piovi - Io ti cielo, 1947

Various types of visual arts developed in the geographical area now known as Mexico.

The development of these arts roughly follows the history of Mexico, divided into the pre hispanic Mesoamerican era, the colonial period, with the period after Mexican War of Independence, the development Mexican national identity through art in the nineteenth century, and the florescence of modern Mexican art after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).

Frida Kahlo | Quotes /Aforismi

• "Il surrealismo è la magica sorpresa di trovare un leone in quell’armadio in cui si voleva prendere una camicia".
• "Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts".
• "La belleza y la fealdad son un espejismo, porque los demás terminan viendo nuestro interior.
• "Beauty and ugliness are a mirage because others end up seeing our interior".
• "Bellezza e bruttezza sono un miraggio perché gli altri finiscono per vedere la nostra interiorità".

Gabriel Pacheco, 1973 | Surrealist painter

Gabriel Pacheco is an Mexican painter🎨 and illustrator, known for working in the Surreal Visionary style.

Born in the City of Mexico in 1973, Gabriel studied scenography at the National Fine Arts Academy.

He has given several design workshops at the ENAP and illustration courses for children books in Mexico, Italy and Spain.

He began his career as an illustrator when his sister asked him to illustrate a story for her.

Jorge Marin, 1963 | Figurative sculptor

Jorge Marín is a Mexican sculptor and painter. He has been an active figure in the contemporary art world for the last 25 years. He began to sculpt ceramic in the early 1980s.

Bronze has been his preferred material for the last ten years.

His work often depicts horses, centaurs, garudas, children, madonna's, acrobats, along with elements such as spheres, masks, arrows, boats and scales.

These concepts are consistent with recurring themes such as reflection and balance.

Alberto Guillen, 1951 | Watercolor flowers

Mexican artist Alberto Guillen is well known for his watercolor paintings of flowers.

Alberto Guillen was born in Mexico City. Lives and works in Salem, Oregon.

Artist's education: 2 years of traditional training in the art of painting at the University of Willamette and the study of Photoshop CS4, and Painter 11, Wacom Intuos4 Digital Tablet.

Diego Rivera | Social Realist painter / muralist

Considered the greatest Mexican painter of the twentieth century, Diego Rivera (1886-1957) had a profound effect on the international art world.

Among his many contributions, Rivera is credited with the reintroduction of fresco painting into modern art and architecture.

His radical political views and tempestuous romance with the painter Frida Kahlo were then, and remain today, a source of public intrigue.

Frida Kahlo to José Bartoli | Love letter, 1946

"My Bartoli-Jose-Guiseppe-my red one,

I don’t know how to write love letters.

But I wanted to tell you that my whole being opened for you.

Since I fell in love with you everything is transformed and is full of beauty.

I would like to give you the prettiest colors, I want to kiss you…

[I want] our dream worlds to be one.

I would like to see from your eyes, hear from your ears, feel with your skin, kiss with your mouth. In order to see you from below [I would like] to be the shadow that is born from the soles of your feet and that lengthens along the ground upon which you walk….

Frida Kahlo | Surrealist painter

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)🎨 was an Mexican painter who produced mostly small, highly personal self-portraits using elements of fantasy and a style inspired by native popular art.

Kahlo was born in Coyoacán, Mexico, near Mexico City.

While a student at Mexico City's National Preparatory School in 1925, she sustained severe injuries in a bus accident. During her recuperation, Kahlo taught herself to paint.

After three years she took some of her first paintings to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera🎨, who encouraged her to continue her work.

Juan Medina, 1950 | Surrealist / Hyperrealist painter

Juan Medina, Mexican painter, was born in Mexico City, 1950. In the beginning it was shape, then came light, afterwards color and finally texture; as in the architectonic creation, the genesis of Juan Medina’s pictorial work rests on a solid structure of techniques and concepts that weave in plastic dimensions his memories made of oil and canvas.

With time, the step from watercolor to oil was the resource that allowed him to approach with mastery the conscience of time encrusted in stone, wood, mirrors and all model object that transfers Renaissance rhetoric without moralizing it.