CURATORSHIP: Sylvia Navarrete with advisory by Juan Carlos Pereda

MARCO presents the retrospective exhibition Rufino Tamayo. The Ecstasy of Color, which brings us closer to the most intimate work of the Oaxacan artist, connected to dreams and an inward search in which he develops a science of color and achieves a unique visual language. Tamayo draws on certain pre-Hispanic aesthetics, architecture, and sculpture, transfiguring them to revitalize them in a contemporary artistic language.

The exhibition showcases the artist’s experimentation in geometry and abstraction and brings together 54 works, some from the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) and others from the Museo Rufino Tamayo and the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), along with key pieces from private collections. The selection includes small- and large-format paintings spanning nearly all of Tamayo’s creative periods, including the transportable mural Homage to the Indian Race (1952), commissioned for the exhibition Mexican Art from Pre-Hispanic Times to the Present, shown in 1953 in Paris, Stockholm, and London.

Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) devoted his life to painting as an intimate and transformative creative experience, always guided by a brilliant sense of color and a passion for pre-Hispanic archaeology. He gradually moved away from indigenous and mestizo portraiture in favor of a model that maximized the human silhouette, evoking the spiritual connection between heaven and earth. In his mature years, he firmly embraced the conviction that the canvas is an inexhaustible field for experimenting with color, extracting its full magnetism, and merging figure and abstraction to express the infinite.