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Lot Essay
A pioneer of functionalist architecture in Mexico and a renowned muralist, O'Gorman stands out within Mexico's pantheon of modern artists for his highly original and imaginative work in different media over a long and prolific career. A student and contemporary of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, whose adjoining house-studios he designed in the early 1930s, O'Gorman is perhaps best known for his epic narratives of Mexico's history, among them the acclaimed 43,000-square-foot mosaic at Mexico City's Ciudad Universitaria. Lesser known than his public commissions and buildings, O'Gorman's easel paintings explore a richly poetic, oneiric universe, most often distilled in the genre of landscapes, both real and imagined. He devoted himself almost exclusively to painting between 1942 and 1948, and his mature landscapes from this period evince an extraordinary acuity of vision and responsiveness to the natural world.
The metaphysical landscapes rank among O'Gorman's most compelling works, illustrating fantastic environments in a preternatural state of flux and transformation. In their haunting atmospherics and esoteric vision, these paintings call to mind the somber, apprehensive dreamscapes of the Surrealists Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst. Yet they belong as well to an older landscape tradition stretching back to the Northern Renaissance. O'Gorman shared with such artists as Hieronymous Bosch and Albrecht Altdorfer an "astonishment at the magnificence of the universe, the panoramic extension of its landscapes," Larissa Pavlioukova and Adrián Soto have suggested, noting commonalities in "the continuation of the themes of the ruins, the vegetation, the cavernous settings, and the predominance of nature over man."[1]
Astonishing in its technical complexity, the petrified forest of El reino vegetal es un país lejano unfurls organically into the deep space of the painting, its gnarled tree trunks taking on extravagantly grotesque and impossible proportions. The sprawling limbs and branches convulse and distend, all but subsuming the green foliage in their wake; the cave-like formations in the foreground suggest ulterior spaces hidden in and amongst the forest floor. The peculiar luminosity of O'Gorman's earth colors results from his customary use of egg tempera, applied in layers of semi-transparent glazes that give a gleaming, almost ethereal quality to the painted surface. Working here within a limited palette, O'Gorman describes in painstaking and lucid detail the seeping, almost sinister accretions of the landscape as it spreads from root to bough, claiming new ground.
"The irrational, fantastic, oneiric element" of O'Gorman's painting "directs us clearly and directly to the world of subjectivity," Ida Rodríguez Prampolini has remarked, and the undiscovered country of this, his eponymous natural kingdom, is undoubtedly that of his imagination.[2] O'Gorman once described his practice of painting as "occupational therapy," and there is in the vast interiority of this landscape the intimation of a recondite and private world fully disencumbered of the austere rationalism that long characterized his architectural work. Painted on an intimate scale that belies the grandeur of its subject, El reino vegetal es un país lejano elegantly describes the fanciful and philosophical meanderings of its maker's mind, suggesting the myriad life and metaphor of the natural world.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Larissa Pavlioukova and Adrián Soto, "Un mundo sin orillas," in O'Gorman (México, D.F.: Bital Grupo Financiero, 1999), 252.
2) Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, Juan O'Gorman: arquitecto y pintor (México: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de México, 1982), 49.
The metaphysical landscapes rank among O'Gorman's most compelling works, illustrating fantastic environments in a preternatural state of flux and transformation. In their haunting atmospherics and esoteric vision, these paintings call to mind the somber, apprehensive dreamscapes of the Surrealists Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst. Yet they belong as well to an older landscape tradition stretching back to the Northern Renaissance. O'Gorman shared with such artists as Hieronymous Bosch and Albrecht Altdorfer an "astonishment at the magnificence of the universe, the panoramic extension of its landscapes," Larissa Pavlioukova and Adrián Soto have suggested, noting commonalities in "the continuation of the themes of the ruins, the vegetation, the cavernous settings, and the predominance of nature over man."[1]
Astonishing in its technical complexity, the petrified forest of El reino vegetal es un país lejano unfurls organically into the deep space of the painting, its gnarled tree trunks taking on extravagantly grotesque and impossible proportions. The sprawling limbs and branches convulse and distend, all but subsuming the green foliage in their wake; the cave-like formations in the foreground suggest ulterior spaces hidden in and amongst the forest floor. The peculiar luminosity of O'Gorman's earth colors results from his customary use of egg tempera, applied in layers of semi-transparent glazes that give a gleaming, almost ethereal quality to the painted surface. Working here within a limited palette, O'Gorman describes in painstaking and lucid detail the seeping, almost sinister accretions of the landscape as it spreads from root to bough, claiming new ground.
"The irrational, fantastic, oneiric element" of O'Gorman's painting "directs us clearly and directly to the world of subjectivity," Ida Rodríguez Prampolini has remarked, and the undiscovered country of this, his eponymous natural kingdom, is undoubtedly that of his imagination.[2] O'Gorman once described his practice of painting as "occupational therapy," and there is in the vast interiority of this landscape the intimation of a recondite and private world fully disencumbered of the austere rationalism that long characterized his architectural work. Painted on an intimate scale that belies the grandeur of its subject, El reino vegetal es un país lejano elegantly describes the fanciful and philosophical meanderings of its maker's mind, suggesting the myriad life and metaphor of the natural world.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Larissa Pavlioukova and Adrián Soto, "Un mundo sin orillas," in O'Gorman (México, D.F.: Bital Grupo Financiero, 1999), 252.
2) Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, Juan O'Gorman: arquitecto y pintor (México: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de México, 1982), 49.