An exhibition organized by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) through the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, City. EXHIBITION TITLE: RETROFUTURA. Rafael Coronel.

EXCLUSIVE MEDIA TOUR: Thursday, 20 September 2012 at 11:00 am., with the curator Juan Rafael Coronel.

EXCLUVISE MEMBERS OPENING: Thursday, 20 September 2012 at 7:30 pm.

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC: Friday, 21 September 2012, regular Museum hours.

CURATOR: Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera.

MUSEOGRAPHY: Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey.

CONTENT: The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO) presents an homage to the large trajectory of the painter from the state of Zacatecas, Mexico, that is comprised of pieces elaborated from the beginning of his career, until those most recent works that the artist made ex professo for this exhibition. The selection of works includes paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

Retrofutura. Rafael Coronel (Retro-future) reveals the characteristic elements of the artist’s pictorial style: his interest in portraiture, the frontal presentation of people, the gestural and environmental theatricality, the ambiguity of space, and the expressivity of faces.

An exhibition organized by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) through the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, .

GALLERIES: 6 to 11, First Floor.

ON VIEW: September 21, 2012 to January 13, 2013.

TECHNIQUES: Painting, drawing and sculpture.

NUMBER OF WORKS: More than 90 works.

CATALOGUE: Published in collaboration with the Secretaría de Educación Pública, the Zacatecas state government, MARCO, Cydsa, and Talamontes Editores. It includes texts by Luis Carlos Emerich, Teresa del Conde, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Margarita Nelken, Rafael Vargas, Miguel Duhalt Krauss, Sergio Pitol, and Sylvia Navarrete. The publication will be available in the MARCO Store on the day of the inauguration.

CONTACT FOR THE MEDIA Communication and Image Management | Ph. +52 (81) 8262.45OO, ext. 545, 546 y 547 | F. +52 (81) 8262.45O9 [email protected] | [email protected] | www.marco.org.mx

Cover: Retrato del cristiano, 1968 | Acrilic on canvas | 120 x 160 cm | Acervo del Museo de Arte Moderno, Conaculta/INBA

MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO DE MONTERREY • RAFAEL CORONEL • PRESS RELEASE | SEPTEMBER 2O12 • PRESENTATION

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey presents Retrofutura. Rafael Coronel, the most important anthological show that has been undertaken of this Mexican artist, organized by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, through the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes as an homage to his solid career of more than sixty years.

The exhibition brings together approximately ninety works that give testimony both to the technical skill and poetic narrative that characterizes Coronel’s work and to the different thematic interests and styles that have captured his attention. It museography is intended to allow the spectator to discover—throughout a non- chronological journey— his early works, Retro, until his latest ex professo pieces produced for especially for this show, Future.

Unlike the majority of his contemporaries that were more inclined to abstraction, Rafael Coronel (Zacatecas, 1931) has confronted figurative painting, especially portraiture. The particular evolution of the artist in this genre is evident throughout the exhibition. Among his early works is Mujer de Jerez (Woman from Jerez), 1952, a piece for which he won the Visual Arts Contest and obtained a grant that enabled him to study at the School of Painting and Sculpture “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City.

The experimentation of the artist in the 1950s led him to abstract portraits with geometric faces as in Luis Cardoza y Aragón and Autorretrato en Nueva York (Self-portrait in New York), both from 1959. At the end of the 1960s, Coronel had a leaning towards abstraction expressionism and painted heartbreaking faces like Cantante (Singer), 1965, and Corzas (Female deer), 1964, that reflect his taste for sad and melancholic themes and environments that he still works with today.

In Coronel’s imagery live somber monks, friars, saints, bodies of the dead, and demons that flail around between reality and fantasy in a crude, and yet at times, poetic, universe, such as Retrato del cristiano (Portrait of the Cristiano), 1968, and the undated work, La troupe de Anton (Anton’s troop).

The influence of the great European masters like Goya, Rembrandt, Ucello, and Vermeer are present in the majority of Coronel’s works, especially the gloominess of Caravaggio, which seems to emerge in the more recent work like Folklore oaxaqueño (Oaxacan folklore) and Las Lomas (The hills), both from 2011.

In addition to the portraits, a very distinct figure appears in the artist’s work, but at times related a human being and nature. The first of Coronel’s rats is from 1958 when he painted La rata en el basurero (The rat in the rubbish pile) that year. One will also be able to appreciate other examples in the show like the series Busquen a la rata (Looking for the rat), 1973. The enormous size of these animals suggests similarities to human behavior.

The curatorial work of this exhibition was headed by Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, who endeavored to identify the universe of his father and to allow for a reading of his practice that would provide a rich and clear vision of the different stages of Coronel’s production.

The works in Retrofutura come from the Blanton Museum of Art of the University of Texas in Austin, the Museo and the Museo Rafael Coronel in the city of Zacatecas; the Fondo Patrimonial on behalf of El Colegio de México; the Museo de Art Moderno of INBA (National Institute of Fine Arts); the Colección de Pago en Especie de la SHCP; the collection of the Patrimonio Artístico of the Banco Nacional de México (Banamex); the Museo de Arte Modern of the State of Mexico in Toluca; the Galería Enrique Guerrero; and the Lourdes Sosa Galería.

The exhibition is shown at MARCO in Monterrey after travel for presentations at the Museo de Palacio de Bellas Artes, in Mexico City; the Ex Templo de San Agustín, in Zacatecas; and finally, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, in San Luis Potosí.

MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO DE MONTERREY • RAFAEL CORONEL • PRESS RELEASE | SEPTEMBER 2O12 • BIOGRAPHY

1931 Born on October 24 in Zacatecas, Zacatecas. 1936 Makes his first renowned drawings. 1952 Receives a prize for participating in the Concurso de Artes Plásticas. To be rewarded with the scholarship, Cornel had to attend and be a student at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura “La Esmeralda.” One of his teachers was the Mexican artist, . 1953 He participates in two collective exhibitions, one in the Galería de la Biblioteca Cervantes, located at La Esmeralda, the other, in the basement of the newspaper Excélsior, given the name Galería Excélsior. 1954 Rafael Coronel enters the Galería de Arte Mexicano after he meets Inés Amor, all thanks to the recommendation made by the Guatemalan painter, Carlos Mérida. 1954 Leaves La Esmeralda. 1956 He accomplishes his first individual exhibition in the Galería de Arte Mexicano. 1957 Inés Amor considers and takes him as one of the exclusive painters. 1959 He carries out his first individual exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. 1960 He marries Ruth Rivera. 1964 Participates in the opening exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno de la Ciudad de México. 1964 He begins painting two murals for the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, which were both placed in the Museo Nacional de Antropología. 1969 His wife, Ruth Rivera, dies. 1974 He acquires first prize in Tokio’s biennal exhibition with his painting : La muerte de la libélula, 1973. 1979 By this year, Rafael Coronel has succeeded in making the biggest collection of Mexican masks executed to this day. (Currently, the number of masks sums up to ten thousand). 1983 Exposición retrospectiva de Artes Plásticas de Pago en Especie 1983, Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público. 1989 The Fundación Desarrollo Cultural y Artístico, Rafael Coronel A.C is born. 1989 The exhibition Rafael Coronel. Retrospectiva 1950-1988 is shown in the Museo de Monterrey and in the Instituto Mexicano de Cultura, San Antonio, Texas. 1990 Packed with five thousand Mexican masks, 400 prehipanic pieces, 1500 colonial ceramic pieces, 200 puppets from the Compañía de Rosete Aranda and 100 drawings by , the Museo Rafael Coronel is inaugurated in the Ex-Convento de San Agustín. 1994 Is member of the Academia de Artes. 1995 La vieja del ganso appears in the Lotería Nacional tickets for Friday’s May 26th, 1995 raffle. 1996 He’s rewarded with the Condecoración Zacatecas 450 given by the state government. 1996 Bernard and Edith Lewin donate a collection of about one thousand Mexican pieces to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, including 100 pieces created by Rafael Coronel. This represents the biggest heritage of its kind located outside of Mexico. 2000 Receives recognition for 50 years of artistic trajectory and for his generosity to the city of Zacatecas. 2003 His work appeared in the collective exhibition Siglo XX: Grandes Maestros Mexicanos at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), Nuevo León, Mexico. 2010 He’s granted the Iberoamericano al Mérito de las Artes award. General Latin American Secretariat and Zacatecas state government, Mexico.

MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO DE MONTERREY • RAFAEL CORONEL • PRESS RELEASE | SEPTEMBER 2O12 •