Susana Noriega
Susana Noriega Rivero (born 1952) is a contemporary Mexican painter, whose style is avant-garde which is inscribed in the abstract expressionist and surrealist movements. Her art often expresses extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds.
Susana Noriega | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Susana Noriega Rivero 15 February 1952 Mexico City |
| Nationality | Mexican |
| Occupation | Painter |
Biography
Born in Mexico City (Cuidad de Mexico), Noriega Rivero took part in various contests. In 1971, her artistic interests led her to attend the workshops of great masters, such as Raúl Anguiano, Rodolfo Nieto, Luis Velasco, Guillermo Zapfe, and Pascual Santillán.[1]
Although she studied advertising and psychology, she recognized herself as a painter, and she devoted most of her time to pursuing this activity.
Techniques and style
She has made incursions into many techniques: engraving and wood carving; paper engraving; graphic projects for sculpture, as well as painting with charcoal, pigments with oil or water, resins, marble powder, sand and soil, all of them on canvas, wood, clay, stone and paper.
She has specialized in handling graphite and charcoal on paper, as well as mixed techniques with pigments and water or oil, ground marble, sands and resins on canvas. She continuously renews herself, having developed a personal avant-garde style with some influence from abstract expressionism and surrealism. Outsider art is conventionally considered as one of the trends of informalism, but in this painter it is fused with neo-figurative art, an expressionist revival in modern form of figurative art. The term "neo-figurative" emerged in the 1960s in Mexico and Spain to represent a new form of figurative art.[2]
Jean Dubuffet, influenced by Hans Prinzhorn's book Artistry of the Mentally Ill,[3] coined the term art brut, which may be approximately translated as "art in the rough", to refer to the art made by non-professionals or who do not follow aesthetic rules, such as social misfits, children, mentally troubled people, prisoners, etc.[4] Dubuffet gathered a collection of this kind of paintings, which includes works by Aloïse Corbaz, Alfredo Pirucha and Adolf Wölfli.[5] Dubuffet aspired to create an art free from intellectual worries, in which elementary, childish and often cruel figures prevail.
Features
Some traits of Noriega's work in line with outsider art are:
- Rough, spontaneous, grotesque and thoughtless quality, akin to the unconscious.
- Images that reflect her inner world.
- Use of onirist devices.
- Rejection of the traditional approaches to composition (coherence, organization, homogeneity, etc.).
- Great freedom in drawing and palette (earthy, pale or bright colors prevail depending on the mood of each painting).
- Use of very different materials mixed with the paint (plaster, sand, cement, gravel), which add texture and relief.
- Expressive effects through richly material, textured effects.
- Recurring motifs developed during extended periods of time (flower vases, the human body, musical instruments, hearts, animals).[6]
Exhibitions
Her first single exhibition, in the Alliance Française at San Ángel in Mexico City, was inaugurated on Friday, April 27, 1979.[7] The Mexico City paper Novedades reviewed:
An exhibition was opened by painter Susana Noriega, who launches her first single show after having engaged in a series of collective ones. […] The exhibit is made up of 38 graphite and mixed technique paintings. […] [The exhibitor] was accompanied by […] the principal and assistant headmaster of the Alliance Française at San Ángel, Alain Gallas and Robert Guyon. Among the guests of honor was also the Cultural Under-Secretary-General with the [French] Embassy, Patrick Abecasis. […] The exhibition may be visited until May 10.[8]
She went on to exhibit, either individually or collectively, in the following venues and galleries:
- Galería Estela Shapiro, Mexico City, 1980
- Centro de Estudios en Ciencias de la Comunicación, Cuidad de Mexico, 1982, 1983
- Secretaría de Cultura y Bienestar Social del gobierno del estado de Querétaro (today Instituto Queretano de la Cultura y las Artes), México, 1985, 1986, 1987
- Casa de Cultura de Toluca, State of Mexico, 1991, 1992
- Centro Cultural Juan Rulfo, Mixcoac, Mexico City, 1996
- Mandarin House Restaurant Exhibition Hall, San Ángel, Mexico City, 1996, 1997
- Misrachi Gallery, Oaxaca, México, 1998
- Casa de las Campanas de Tlalpan, Mexico City, 1998, 1999, 2000
- X-Dada Exhibition Center, 2001
- Constante y Asociados Gallery, 1999, 2000, 2201, 2002
- Casa de la Cultura Jaime Sabines, Galerías Adán y Eva, Mexico City, 2002
- La Cueva de Bouchot, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005
- The painter's studio, 2006-2013
- Goiko Arte, online gallery, 2013-2018
- Café-Arte, Guadalupe Inn, Mexico City, 2014
- Centro Cultural Juan Rulfo, Mixcoac, Mexico City, 2016
From the 1960s she has contributed with her paintings to different media, such as magazines Plural (currently Vuelta) and Sí para Jóvenes, and newspapers El Sol de Querétaro and El Sol de Toluca. She has also illustrated short-story and poetry collections.
Painting collections
Virginia Aspe Armella, Norma Barquet, Enrique Beraha, Alfonso and Ernesto Bolio, Ezequiel Castro, Ana Laura Constante, Paloma De Lille, Rubén Durand, Cecilia and María Luisa Elío, Francisco Franco Ibargüengoitia, Carlos Fuentes, Jomí García Ascot, Raúl Gasca, Alicia Ibáñez Parkman, Luis Legarreta, Alberto Lifshitz, Carmen Madero, Pablo Marentes, Martha Maza, Maricela Mir, Héctor Muciño, Pedro Ojeda, Octavio Paz, Erwin Preston, Mario Quiñones, Agustín and Nieves Rivero Blásquez, Héctor Rivero Borrell, Ricardo Secín, Carlos Serrano, Estela Shapiro, Malke Tapuach, Ángela Treviño, Carmen Ubaldini, Luis Velasco.[9]
Gallery
Sunflower marguerites, oil on canvas, 1986
Fished fish, watercolor or engraved paper, 1997
Blue flowers, cream vase, acrylic on canvas, 2007
Window and road, mixed technique on canvas, 2009
Zither, mixed technique on canvas, 2010
References
- Guillermo Tovar de Teresa et al., Repertorio de artistas en México: artes plásticas y decorativas, Mexico, Grupo Financiero Bancomer, 1996.
- Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: the Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996, 1999).
- Hans Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, New York, Springer-Verlag, 1972 (translation from the original work in German, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, Berlin, Julius Springer, 1922).
- Jean Dubuffet, "Art Brut in Preference to the Cultural Arts", translation from French by Allen S. Weiss and Paul Foss, in Art Brut: Madness and Marginalia, Allen S. Weiss (ed.), special issue of Art & Text, No. 27, 1988, p. 33.
- Serge Fauchereau (ed.), En torno al art brut, translation by Inés Bértolo, Madrid, Ediciones Arte y Estética, Círculo de Bellas Artes, 2007.
- André Breton, "El arte de los locos, la llave de los campos", chapter 5 of Antología (1913-1966), twelfth edition, selection and prologue by Marguerite Bonnet, translated by Tomás Segovia, Mexico, Siglo XXI, 2004.
- "Catálogo de exposiciones de arte en 1979", Supplement of Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, vol. 13, No. 49, first edition, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1979.
- Roberto and María Eugenia Amor, "Obras a lápiz y técnica mixta presenta Susana Noriega", Novedades, Mexico City, Wednesday, May 2, 1979.
- Ana Garduño, El poder del coleccionismo de arte: Álvar Carrillo Gil, first edition, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Coordinación de Estudios de Posgrado, 2009.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Susana Noriega.- Prinzhorn Collection (in German)
- Biography at Societé des Écrivains (in French)
- At Goiko Arte