Exhibition features works never before seen in San Diego from the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City

On Saturday, May 17, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) will present Treasures of the Tamayo, Mexico City at its La Jolla location. The exhibition will remain on view through August 31, 2014.

Treasures of the Tamayo Museum, Mexico City brings to San Diego highlights from one of Mexico’s foremost museums of modern and contemporary art. In 1981, Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991) opened the doors of his eponymous museum, to which the Mexican artist donated both his paintings and his collection of late-modernist and contemporary art.

The selections featured in this exhibition include three canvases by Tamayo—an iconic portrait of his wife Olga, a watermelon still life, and nocturnal skyscape. These paintings’ distinctive bright colors and abstracted figures embody the artist’s signature synthesis of the pre-Columbian imagery and folk forms of Mexico with the modernist movements of Europe and the United States.

Other selections in the exhibition reveal Tamayo’s cosmopolitan approach to collecting, influenced by the various avant-garde movements he encountered during lengthy periods abroad. These works include large figurative paintings by Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon, and a prime example of Mark Rothko’s color field abstractions. The strongest of Tamayo’s fellow Latin American artists are highlighted with works such as Francisco Toledo’s trademark animal paintings.

Works by contemporary artists such as Gabriel Orozco, Francis Alÿs, and Carlos Amorales—which the Museum has acquired since Tamayo’s death—represent Latin American artists involved in today’s global dialogue.

Treasures of the Tamayo Museum, Mexico City marks a partnership between two likeminded institutions, both committed to collecting and showing work that reflects mid-20th century artistic advances, as well as forward-looking recent work that engages today’s most relevant concerns.