Manuel Felguerez Sculpture 1970 Cat Ceramic Mexico

Animal sculpture (Mexico, circa 1970) depicting a cat in black ceramic from the Oaxaca region, decorated with a coral-red glazed motif. This work is commonly attributed to the Mexican artist Manuel Felguerez (1928-2020). Good condition. Dimensions: 36 cm high x 17.5 cm x 15 cm at the base.



Born in 1928 in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, Manuel Felguerez discovered his artistic vocation during a trip to Europe as a teenager. He began his art studies in France in the years following World War II, gravitating towards abstraction. This was not unusual: an expatriate artist traveling to Europe after the war to study abstract art. For a Mexican artist, however, it went against cultural tradition. The essay *The Labyrinth of Solitude*, by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, illuminates the extent to which Felguerez was truly revolutionary in embracing abstraction. Written in 1945, while Paz himself was living in Paris, this essay exposes the social conventions that contributed to the widespread adoption of the realistic art style embodied by Mexican muralism in the years following the Mexican Revolution. Known internationally primarily for the works of artists like David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco, Mexican muralism foregrounded figurative images of ordinary people. At the time, the majority of Mexican peasants and laborers were illiterate, so the narrative images of the murals offered an opportunity to tell the story, present, and future of Mexico, and to disseminate a new, postcolonial vision of Mexican society that could be shared by all Mexicans.