Still Life

Still Life painting was an important genre in Modern Mexican Painting. It allowed artists to combine objects with specific resonance within Mexican culture or its indigenous craft tradition with expressionist and symbolist painting styles. This illustrated the distinct national identity of modernity within Mexican art. Painted in 1944, Equilibrium is the product of this new synthesis of academic rigor and stylistic freedom that was common among the painters on the fringe of the Mexican Muralism movement. The painting explores a different type of figuration: one in which an exacerbated subjectivity (notably in the precise rendering of the flowers) is contrasted with an intimate and dreamlike setting that is distinctly personal and other-worldly.