This outstanding and very rare etching by Nieto is in pristine condition. It appears to have never been framed. The actual image size is 14.5 x 18.7".
It is signed in pencil, and numbered 7/40, from a very small edition. Published by Galerie Berggruen, San Francisco, CA.
Outstanding Mexican painter Rodolfo Nieto was born in Oaxaca July 14, 1936, and spent the first dozen years of his life there, until his family moved to Mexico City in 1949. His artistic vocation led him to enter the Esmeralda School of Art in 1953 at the age of 17. During the 1950s, painter Juan Soriano became his artistic mentor and introduced him to various painting media. More importantly, he instilled in the young artist an appreciation for European art. Nieto was particularly drawn to German expressionism, according to author Alberto Blanco, and although they were not formally his teachers, Jesus Reyes Ferreira and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano guided Nieto during his formative years in the direction his art would eventually take when he matured.
His first solo show was in 1959 at the San Carlos Academy and was called "Steel, Blood and Killing," reflecting one of the brief occasions when Nieto's socio-political themes took precedence over his whimsey. After that first exhibition, Nieto went to Europe and settled in Paris in 1959 to join the search for his particular path in modern art and to enter the ranks of great artistic searchers, from Picasso to Jean Debuffet and Paul Klee, whom he greatly admired. He made friends with authors, including Octavio Paz, and many painters, and travelled all over Europe absorbing the latest artistic trends while studying the great old masters in museums. He attended the lithograph workshop of Michel Casse and studied metal engraving with William Hayter.
By 1961, Nieto was exhibiting his works at the Modern Museum of Art in Oslo, Norway, home of the great expressionist, Munch, whose "The Scream" is one of the world's best-known works of expressionist art. At that exhibition, he shared the walls with another painter from Oaxaca who was just starting to be known, Francisco Toledo. Another great Oaxacan painter, Rodolfo Morales, a master of magic mytho-realism, was also just beginning his career. In 1963 and 1968, Nieto won top prizes at the Paris Biennial. He spent the entire decade of the 1960s in Europe, producing what would become the major and most important part of his prolific lifetime of works. By the time he returned to Mexico and Oaxaca in 1972, he was famous. He began experimenting in various new media and techniques, including collages and lacquers, and began creating his bestiary, a series of playful, brilliant works of animals both real and mythological, which are among the most successful of his works. They contain a great sense of ironic humor, which he considered essential to artistic creation. He had many more exhibitions and won many more awards before his death in 1985 at 49 in Oaxaca. This tribute to a fine Mexican artist, sponsored by the National Institute of Fine Arts and the National Council for Culture and the Arts, and curated and coordinated by Marina Vázquez Ramos, is presented chronologically, starting with pencil drawings from 1954 in which Nieto's originality and imagination are already evident.
