Francisco Toledo, artist

Widely considered to be Mexico's greatest living artist, Toledo is as celebrated for his activity on behalf of his native Oaxaca's cultural heritage and natural environment as he is for his wide-ranging and prolific talent, which encompasses paintings, prints, photographs, and ceramic sculptures. In Mexico he is often called el maestro (the teacher or master), a sign of respect not only for his artistic production but also for his leadership in protecting Oaxacan political autonomy and its endagered folk crafts, native plants, and historic buildings. A precocious and independent artist who turned away from the politicized subject matter of revolutionaly muralists José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siquieros, Toledo had his first one-person exhibitions in 1959 at the age of nineteen in Mexico City and Fort Worth, Texas. Now in his sixties, Toledo has developed a unique visionary style that draws both on his knowledge of postwar European painting and printmaking (which he first absorbed while living in Paris in 1960-65) and on his absorption of Zapotec Indian culture. Described as the quintessential magical realist, Toledo's vividly graphic and often encrusted work plays homage to indigenous traditions while inventing a highly personal and distinctive imagery that derives from family fables, sixteenth century natural histories, and a keen observation of the natural world, with his lens focused on animals not conventionally associated with beauty-such as bats, iguanas, toads, and pigs. Frequently engaged in sexual or violent actions, his human and animal protagonists inhabit a richly patterned and textured anthropomorphic universe universe in which nature's life forces are sometimes threatened by civilization, as in the self-explanatory Shoes and Toads (1972). Toledo often freely associates his prismatic portrayals of insects, leaves, and animals with metaphors from an array of artistic and literary sources, including Franz Kafka and the French Surrealist writer Georges Bataille, whose violent pornographic novella History of the Eye (1928) inspired the mirror-like and Cyclopean Self-portrait of 1996.