"Aftrer the Bath" original charcoal and pastel drawing by Francisco Zuniga. The original drawing is dated 1974.
19" x 27"
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About the Artist
FRANCISCO ZUNIGA
(Costa Rican/Mexican 1912 – 1998)
Internationally acclaimed sculptor, painter, and print maker Francisco Zuniga (1912-1998) was born in Costa Rica to sculptor Manuel Maria Zuniga. Zuniga took, for a short while, studied drawing, stone sculpture, and engraving at the Art School of San Jose, before he worked from 1928 to 1934 in his father's business as a sculptor's assistant. In 1936 Zuniga immigrated to Mexico where he studied design and sculpture.
Mexico City in 1936 was, even then, one of the major art centers of the Americas. As such it witnessed and participated in many of the frenzied and controversial art movements which reflected the political and intellectual climate of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Muralism, the graphic arts, the incorporation of international movements had produced an artistic climate, which would eventually attract to Mexico international artists and intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, André Breton and Antonin Artaud. Then as now, Mexico City was a major world capital with the infrastructure necessary to exhibit and expose new aesthetic concepts.
For all these reasons it was the most obvious destination of choice for Zuñiga. In Mexico he worked with the painter Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, and would become one of the founders of La Esmeralda, the National School of Painting and Sculpture, teaching there between 1938 and until his retirement in1970. Zuniga also fulfilled commissions for numerous public monuments, but between 1960 and 1980, he began to work exclusively on his studio projects. At the time of his death in 1998, his work would be part of major museum collections internationally.
Zuniga's art reflects a love and respect for Central American people and traditions. In 1972, he created his first lithograph. As a complement to his emotionally powerful sculpture, Zuniga's prints articulate the sensitivity and sensuality of the human figure. This celebration of the human spirit is most often expressed in sculpture, drawings, and lithographs of women as timeless and stoic earth mothers.
Zuniga's women have the startling presence of ancient goddesses disguised in the situations of daily life and motherhood. They are staunch and monumental females, madonnas with Indian features, solemnly poised. “Of his style, Zuniga says, "I begin with an emotion, an attitude, a movement caught by chance, a woman wrapped in thought, sitting, walking, or perhaps leading a child.”
Though Francisco Zuniga did create some abstract pieces, the majority of his work is composed of nudes, generally female, of peasant stock. With scrawny or stocky bodies unfamiliar to classical sculpture, Zuniga expanded the intellectual reach of his work by mixing it with regional ethnographic studies of body type and lifestyle.
In 1947, he married Elena Laborde, a painting student. They had three children, Ariel, Javier and Marcela.
In 1949, he was part of the founding board of the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, and in 1951, he joined the Frente Nacional de Artes Plástica of Francisco Goitia
Though his bronze sculpture continued to evolve throughout his life, Francisco Zuniga expanded his range of mediums throughout his life, modeling in clay and plaster and sculpting in bronze, Carrara marble and alabaster. In 1972, at the age of sixty, Zuniga created his first lithograph, a form that he would work in prolifically for the rest of his life. The prints, in monochrome and color, shared subject matter with his sculpture but allowed him a closer connection to the drawings that served as the basis of both.
Journalist Fernando González Gortázar lists Zúñiga as one of the 100 most notable Mexicans of the 20th century, while the Encyclopedia Britannica calls him "perhaps the best sculptor" of the Mexican political modern style.
Major individual exhibitions during his career include the Bernard Lewin Gallery in Los Angeles in 1965, a retrospective at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1969 and various exhibitions in Europe in the 1980s.
In 1971, he received the Acquisition Prize at the 1971 Biennial of Open Air Sculpture of Middelheim in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1975 twenty of his drawings with the Misrachi Gallery obtained the silver medal at the International Book Exposition of Leipzig. In the 1980s, he was named an Academic of the Accademia delle Arte e del Lavoro in Parma, Italy. In Mexico he won the Elías Sourasky Prize.
In 1984 he won the first Kataro Takamura Prize of the Third Biennial of Sculpture in Japan.
He became a Mexican citizen in 1986, fifty years after his arrival in the country.
In 1992 he received the Premio Nacional de Arte, and in 1994, the Palacio de Bellas Artes held a tribute to his career.
Near the end of his life, illness left him nearly blind, which caused him to shift his artistic work to terra cotta, using his hands to create the line.
Francisco Zuniga drew several notable commissions during his lifetime, including the monumental stone reliefs of the Allegory of Earth and Communications at the Secretaria de Comunicaciones in Mexico City. Francisco Zuniga is also well-represented in major museum collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and Mexico City, the Phoenix Art Museum, Harvard University, Ponce Art Museum and the Hirshhom Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
