By Raúl Menchaca
HAVANA, Jan. 21 (Xinhua) — The exhibition “Four Hundred Years of Mexican Art” opened this weekend at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba with works by the main exponents of the plastic arts in Mexico.
The exhibition offers a selection made up of paintings, drawings and engravings belonging to the funds acquired by the institution since it was founded in 1913 and that make up the current collections of Latin American Art and International Contemporary Art.
“Culture has been a vehicle of communication, contact, closeness, friendship between the two countries, and this is another testimony of that complicity in the creative aspect, in the artistic aspect,” said the embassy’s cultural attaché. of Mexico in Cuba, Santiago Ruy Sánchez.
The diplomat and writer considered that the Havana museum “has invaluable treasures” not only of Mexican culture, but of art in general.
The works exhibited in the Temporary Room of the Universal Art Building of the venue cover different periods and styles, from pre-Hispanic art to muralism and the avant-garde.
According to the curators Yanet Berto and Margarita González, the merit of the exhibition is “the dissemination of Mexican plastic arts acquired by the museum at different times, in diverse forms and dissimilar origins, and the possibility of showing part of this heritage.” .
The exhibition will remain open until the end of March and includes pieces from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, most of them anonymous, although some correspond to figures of New Spain painting with international recognition such as José de Páez, Fray Miguel de Herrera and José Acíbar.
It also presents works by 20th-century Mexican artists such as Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, Manuel Felguerez and Jose Luis Cuevas, among others.
“I was very surprised to learn that the painting ‘Adoration of the Three Wise Men’ is the oldest Mexican work preserved in the museum,” student Marisela Ramos told Xinhua.
The young woman, a student at the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Havana, referred in this way to the painting made by the Mexican José Medina, donated to the campus in 1913.
Accompanied by two other students, Ramos toured the exhibition in which different pictorial genres can be seen such as religious, portrait, landscape and genre scenes.
For his part, the young Dayán Ruiz, who took his first steps in painting, shared his taste for muralism, “an aspect in which Mexicans have been precursors and teachers.”
Ruiz confessed at the same time that painting is an artistic discipline that he would like to dedicate himself to professionally.
It is the first time that the venue has held an exhibition of its collections with the specific theme of Mexico and many of the pieces have never been exhibited before.
With more than a century of existence, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba is the main museum in the Caribbean country and houses an extraordinary heritage made up of around 49,000 pieces. End
2024-01-21 17:41:48
#SPECIAL #years #Mexican #art #exhibited #Havana
