Figura

“The folklore of my country seduced me,” Mérida declared, apropos of the ancient Maya and the continuing resonance of indigenous culture across his native Guatemala and in Mexico, his adopted home. “For art to be universal, it must first be local.”1 Mérida settled in Mexico City in 1929 after a two-year stay in Paris, and in a seminal series of Maya figures from this period his work first broached abstraction. The present "Figura" exemplifies this new geometric impulse, seen in the schematic rendering of the woman’s wavy hair and in the planes of color that describe her woven dress, accented by distinctive patterns that traditionally communicated social and symbolic identity. In the rich, decorative economy of Maya textiles, Mérida identified the plastic origins of modern American abstraction and the basis of a new Mexican school, built upon its indigenous inheritance and a universal poetics of pure color and line.

1 Carlos Mérida, “Self-Portrait” [1950], in Carlos Mérida: Graphic Work, 1915-1981, exh. cat. (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1981), n.p.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Abigail McEwen.