Octavio Paz

In this lithograph, Mexican artist Alberto Gironella features his correspondent and friend, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1914-98). A political figure well known for his liberal and democratic thought, Paz is here orbited by a series of objects, which allude to Mexican identity. He reads his own book, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe (1982), a testament to his scholarship and a link to Sor Juana, a famed Mexican intellectual and nun. Visually crowded, the portrait is further indicative of the artist’s flirtation with surrealism: distinctive objects pop out from every angle, among them the skull in the foreground. This memento mori serves as a reminder of Paz’s advanced age and mortality. Paz died in 1998 and Gironella one year later.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and by Thomas Peters