page_title: Manuel Felguérez
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Manuel Felguérez / Career
caption_attribution_description: PUERTA DEL TIEMPO-Manuel Felguerez. Escultura en la Rectoria General de la UAM
context_page_description: Manuel Felguérez Barra was a Mexican abstract artist, part of the Generación de la Ruptura that broke with the muralist movement of Diego Rivera and others in the mid 20th century.
context_section_description: Felguérez's career included painting, planning sculptures, thirty years as a professor, work in theatre and cinema and handcraft design. He had over 250 individual exhibitions and over 1,500 with other artists. He felt that his most significant work was his sculpted murals and public sculptures. He is classified as a member of the Generación de la Ruptura along with Vicente Rojo Almazán, Rodolfo Nieto, José Luis Cuevas, Alberto Gironella, Myra Landau, Lilia Carrillo, Francisco Corzas, Fernando García Ponce and Arnaldo Coen, following the more abstract style pioneered by Carlos Mérida, Cordelia Urueta, Günther Gerzso and Juan Soriano. As a member of the group he faced both political and artistic stigma. He is also associated with other writers and artists of his generation including Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, Juan Jose Gurrola, Alejandro Jodorowski, Alejandro Galindo and Alberto Isaac.
  He worked in both painting and sculpture, specializing in combining sculpture as mural, creating sculpted murals in metal for public and private buildings. Most of these were done early in his career with thirty relief murals using materials such as scrap metal, stones, sand and shells finished by the end of the 1960s. Some of the more important works of this type are at the Diana Theater and the Bahía water park. The "Mural de chatarra" (Mural of junk) was made for the Diana Cinema and was considered by the press to be a provocation as it did not refer to the Mexican Revolution and the people of Mexico. A later work was the tzompantli-mural for the Museo Nacional de Antropología.
  In the late 1950s and during the 1960s, abstract art was not accepted by Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura and Felguérez was mostly limited to exhibiting in galleries. His art was supported by artists such as Jomi, Juan Martin and Juan Garcia Ponce and heavily criticized by Raquel Tibol, Jorge González Camarena and Juan O’Gorman. He supported the Cuban Revolution in 1960, which hurt his career in the United States as his visa was canceled for being a "communist." He was able to visit Cornell University in 1966 but only under special invitation and similarly when he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975.
  His first exhibition was in 1954 at the Insituto Francés de América Latina, where he was favorably received by Justino Fernández, Paul Westheim and Mathias Goeritz. It was the only exhibition where he sold all out the entire show and earned him a scholarship to return to France. His first individual exhibition was in 1958.
  Since then, major exhibitions of his work have included; the I and II Biennials in Paris, the VI in São Paulo, the IV in Tokyo and the XX Biennial in Watercolors at the Brooklyn Museum, the I Bienal de escultura in Mexico City (1962), Confrontación 66, Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (1966), Mexico Today at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco (1978), México ayer y hoy at the Petit Palais in Paris (1981), Libro objeto at the Galería Juan Martín in Mexico City (1982), Obra reciente at the Galería Arte Actual Mexicano in Monterrey (1984), Confrontación 86 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes (1986), and at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (1997).
  Felguérez's works are still shown actively, and murals were still created by the artist in his eighties. In 2009 was the exhibition Manuel Felguérez, Invención Constructiva at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City which was inaugurated by President Felipe Calderón. For the Bicentennial of Mexico's Independence, Felguérez's mural "Ecuación en Acero" (Equation in Steel) was inaugurated by the same president at the Secretariat of Public Education. In 2011, 'Manuel Felguérez: Gráfica y Escultura' exhibited at the Centro Nacional de las Artes (Cenart).
  To commemorate the 40th anniversary of Mexico–China relations in 2012, the Mexican government sponsored the exhibition "Manuel Felguérez: Obra reciente" in Beijing. In the same year, Estética de lo real: Caos y orden de la obra de Manuel Felguérez" was presented at the Museo de Aguascalientes. There is also a hotel/museum/boutique ca
caption: Sculpture Puerta del tiempo at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
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