Coloso (Colossus)

José Luis Cuevas ranks as one of the most controversial and internationally recognized artists of his generation. His work belongs to the Neo-Figurative movement that emerged in the 1960s in resistance both to abstraction and to Mexico’s long entrenched Mural movement. Cuevas’s printmaking work dates back to 1947, when he created his first engravings under the guidance of Lola Cueto, a Mexican printmaker who taught at Mexico City College. The present lithograph is a classic example of his expressionist style, rooted in graphic illustration and caricature. "Colossus" is a portrait of an old man with an enormous and deformed head, its hideous visage a metaphor for the excesses of power and greed. This and other stylized depictions of grotesque and monstrous figures have been interpreted as critiques of Mexico’s political corruption. Throughout the 1980s, the Mexican government promised to eradicate the war on drugs by implementing strong military action, a rhetoric that only served to justify countless politically motivated deaths.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Patricia Ortega-Miranda.