Lot 542
Rafael Coronel (Mexican, b. 1932), "Painter in White", 1971, acrylic on canvas, signed lower right, titled and dated en verso with paper label of Renee Darom Gallery, Tel Aviv, 391-2 in. x 313/4 in., in contemporary giltwood frame with velvet liner. E15000-20000 Note: Born in Zacatecas, Mexico, Rafael Coronel moved at age twenty to Mexico City to study architecture. After stints at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and La Esmeralda, an art school where he met other young artists dissatisfied with established Mexican art movements, Coronel flirted with the grotesque tradition and depicted the poor and suffering of the city around him. By the 1970s, he began painting in a more spiritual vein. His canvases became filled with figures decked out for unspecified rituals against spatially neutral backgrounds. This painting, with its ecclesiastical hat and ghostly white background, represents the best of Coronel's evocations of mysticism and historicism. A member of Mexico's "Ruptura" generation, who broke with the massive, architectonic figural tradition of the Muralists and Social Realists of an earlier generation of artists, Coronel came to draw on nineteenth-century masters such as Francisco de Goya for his approach to a more personal, intimate scale of painting. Reference: Michael Wellen, "Rafael Coronel", in Blanton Museum of Art: Latin American Collection, Gabriel Perez-Barriero, ed. Austin, Texas, 2006.
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