The exhibition “Mistress of the Light” brings together major works by Mexican painter Julia López, a key figure in the Breakaway Generation movement that sought to sever conceptual and aesthetic links with the previous Muralist movement of the late thirties in Mexico.
Born in Ometepec, Guerrero in 1936, Julia López represented the spirit of a newly born urban urge that brought people of the countryside into Mexico City, which happened to live one its vital cultural movements with the murals of Orozco, Rivera and Siquerios being painted.
This burst of artistic energy brought African-Mixtec Julia to the country’s capital at age 16, to become a model in the famed Painting and Sculpture School La Esmeralda in 1952 and to pose for the likes of Diego Rivera, Francisco Zúñiga, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano and José Chávez Morado, among others.
Julia López, together with Frida Khalo, who was a teacher in La Esmeralda at the time, and María Izquierdo, developed a style of painting which touches upon various aesthetics such as the naïve art and a vital expressionism that explores the possibilities of color and light in the canvas to let the inner colorful palette of the “coastal ebony goddess” surface in dreamy and evocative atmospheres of memory and sensuality.
“Mistress of the Light” will run through November 12 to December 10 in Tlalpan’s Viceroy of Mendoza Manor, in south Mexico City.
