About the Work: Francisco Toledo is one of Mexico's most important modern artists of the twentieth century. His significance lies in the creation of a highly original combination of modern painting and indigenous sources. An active artist, Toledo moved between and across Paris, New York and Mexico during the period from 1960 to the early 80s. Toledo's complex works cannot be simplistically labeled as indigenist or primitivist. His original and explorative works are informed simultaneously by pre-Columbian cultures and Aesop's Fables, from native sources and personal experience and background, and from historical accounts of flora and fauna in Mexico from writers such as Bernardino de Sahagún in the sixteenth century. Amongst his favorite themes are: toads, grasshoppers, iguanas, rabbits, scorpions, birds, fish and insects which often acquire anthropomorphic qualities by performing human actions and vice versa, such as toads playing tennis. His representations of creatures in highly textured and/or rich backgrounds are both fantastic and strange, while also the result of careful observation of nature.