Pain

An artist and revolutionary, Islas Allende began his artistic training in 1908 in the National Fine Arts School, where, with the backing of the school's director, Antonio Rivas Mercado, he was awarded a scholarship. He was taught by Enrique Guerra, Félix Parra and Leandro Izaguirre, among other people. In 1909 he completed the second-year sculpture course and, in the 1910-1911 academic year, won the prize for clothed-figure drawing. In 1910, his work was shown at the exhibition of Mexican art held that year by the Painters' and Sculptors' Society to celebrate a hundred years of Independence and organized by Gerardo Murillo (also known as "Dr. Atl"). At this event, his sculpture, Pain was awarded a medal, subsequently being installed in the school's patio. The work depicts a naked young woman in a seated position with her body, supported on tensed arms, bent backwards as if it were emerging from the mass of plaster below it. She is staring upward and her hair is gathered up at the back of her head, allowing us to see the tensed muscles of her neck. This well-proportioned work attests to the artist´s mastery of human anatomy and to his skill in capturing the expression of suffering on the woman's face. Praised by the critics of the time, it bears the date and the Christian name of the artist, who also sometimes signed his works with the pseudonym KGM - in honor of the Yaqui Indian, Cajeme, who had led an uprising of his people in Sonora- which he used, above all, in the illustrations and cartoons that he drew for magazines and newspapers. This sculpture – the only one that the artist is known to have produced- stood in the National Architecture School of the Mexican National Autonomous University before being transferred to the warehouses of the National Fine Arts Institutes Santo Domingo Cultural Center. After being shown at the exhibition entitled 1910: El arte en un año decisivo, it was donated to the MUNAL by the aforesaid cultural center in 1992.