January 4 is an important date for the arts in our State, since the greatest exponent of Yucatecan art, Gabriel Ramírez Aznar, turns 85, working as always in the mornings in his studio located in the Itzimná neighborhood.
Generous character and always a good conversationalist, examiner and attentive to politics, a true figure of the world of art whose passions give him vitality and mark his always critical nature: reading, cinema, art, etc.
Born in Mérida on January 4, 1938, he held his first exhibition in 1965 at the Juan Martín Gallery. In that same year he participated in the IV Youth Biennale in Paris and three years later he became a founding member of the Salon Independiente.
Throughout his career he has participated in more than 60 individual exhibitions and in more than 100 collective exhibitions.
He is a multifaceted creator, along with painting he develops as a writer and film researcher.
Due to his work in culture, he has been the recipient of various national and international awards, including the International Drawing Award “Joan Miró” in its 1972 and 1975 editions in Barcelona; Yucatan Medal, 1986; Grant for Creators from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts in 1989 and 1999, and the “Antonio Mediz Bolio” Literary Award 1997.
His work belongs to important public and private collections.
Since 1994, the Ateneo de Yucatán Museum of Contemporary Art has had a permanent room dedicated to his pictorial work.
Although his work does not correspond to the original members of the Mexican movement of the so-called Rupture, he is one of its first followers and adherents, which is why in various critical texts he is considered an integral part of this group.
His work has a recognizable style both for its compositional freedom and for its intense chromaticism, and for which he achieves pieces with a singular aesthetic that do not respond to pictorial or stylistic conventions, in which the perfect fusion of the new figuration with the abstract painting.
Gabriel Ramírez is an artist with a visual dynamism that could well bring him closer to abstract expressionism, since in his work the will of a direct and intuitive gesture is manifested with bright colors and thick brushstrokes, as well as open fields without limits on the surface, in which there are no hierarchies between the different parts of the composition to build forms through the accumulation of closed stratifications of pure colors, which overlap and concentrate, creating a suggestive network of lines and planes of great visual force.
Likewise, in his work it is possible to appreciate the free expression of the unconscious that allowed him to move naturally, letting his instincts guide him in the creation process and prompt him to work freely.
Each work is a spontaneous creation without any type of restriction, in which chromaticism springs forth, the compositional resource assumed naturally in the process of direct expression, the dynamism and the accent that emerges as a gesture, which gives it his work an opportunity to link the viewer through the polysemic act (the images can have a single meaning or represent several concepts at the same time) and whose interpretation arises from the emotion itself, since they are works that have a significant depth derived of the experience
This is how Yucatan and Mexico should, more than celebrate the meritorious name day of this great artist, recognize the career of the greatest exponent of contemporary art from the south of our country; celebration to which the Museum of Contemporary Art Ateneo de Yucatán, Macay joins, opening to the public a sample of the work of this creator.
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