Cabeza sobre fondo azul (Head on Blue Background),

1984

Tamayo was a central figure in Mexican modernism, known for his work as a painter, printmaker, and sculptor as well as for his influence as a teacher and museum patron. In 1973 he collaborated with Luis Remba at the Taller de Gráfica Mexicana in Mexico City to develop the printmaking process Mixografía. This technique is notable for the highly textured, sculptural quality of the resulting prints, which are created through a multistep process: first a plaster or wax block is carved into a low relief; this sculpted surface is replicated in a copper mold that is hand-inked and filled with a paper slurry before being passed through the printing press. The press casts the paper and impresses the image simultaneously. In his prints, Tamayo used the expressive qualities of the paper’s surface to imbue the print’s subject with a similarly emotive quality.