Top 5 Mexican women artists

On the occasion of celebrating this March 8, Women's Day, this article aims to remember five great Mexican artists who made their way and took their place in the art world despite the difficulties that it has represented for women since centuries past, each one providing a personal and particular language and perspective without which Mexican art would certainly not be the same.

1. Leonora Carrington

Born in England and later naturalized as a Mexican, Carrington was a woman who from a young age lived with impetus and a rebellious spirit, rejecting the teachings of etiquette and manners of the academies and convents she attended in exchange for remaining faithfully interested in fantastic stories, magic and alchemy, a characteristic that can be said, became the distinctive mark of the artist's surrealist paintings.

2. María Izquierdo

Trained at the Academy of San Carlos and the National School of Fine Arts, María Izquierdo was an artist who received great national and even international recognition, being the first Mexican artist to hold an individual exhibition in the United States. With an avant-garde style that was often classified as primitivist, Izquierdo's paintings range from traditional compositions, a reflection of his rural upbringing and his environment in his early youth, to paintings with themes loaded with more nationalist content and, to a certain extent, social criticism.

3. Carmen Mondragón or Nahui Ollín

Muse, model, poet and Mexican artist, she was raised for several years of her childhood in France where she had her first encounter with various arts, including painting, a skill that she would exploit to the fullest on her return to Mexico, signing under the pseudonym “Nahui Ollín”. In the works of art, both her own and those in which she was a model, she shows an erotic and provocative character with which she sought to change the vision of the nude and the female body as a sexual symbol, to share her vision of it as an aesthetic and remove her from the taboo which she was often censored in the art world of her time.

4. Varo Remedies

A naturalized Spanish Mexican, she maintained activities as an entomological and advertising illustrator which would give her certain recognition. However, she is best remembered for her paintings, full of a surrealist charge oriented towards psychoanalysis and alchemy, where she represents imaginary characters in situations not so far away. of reality, which are best interpreted as psychological experiences represented in a visual language, Varo would thus mark her place and style in art. She even came to contribute and receive inspiration from Leonora Carrington, an artist with whom she would live a close friendship and the fruits of this would be reflected in the similarity of the style of both, maintaining a difference in the narrative between them.

5. Frida Kahlo

A misunderstanding aspect that represents Frida's name and artistic production would be to classify her as surrealist, but in her own words she has expressed and clarified that what is reflected in her works are not imaginary or surreal messages, but simply her reality. One in which she lived day after day frustrated and limited by illnesses and deep pain that, despite their constant presence, would only inspire her artistic expression, being one of her few escapes from the reality that characterized it.