Argudín, Luis | Colección

20th-21st Century Mexican

Luis Argudín is a contemporary painter—and by no means a minor one—who defends the great tradition of still life and its continued relevance for contemporary creation. Born in Mexico City in 1955, in the 1970s he accrued a solid academic and theoretical background at the Hammersmith College of Art and Hornsey College of Art, both in London, before forging an impeccable career as a lecturer in ethics and aesthetics.

Not prone to showing off his great erudition, he astutely applies his dedicated study of fifteenth-century Italian masters and painters of the Spanish Baroque, as well as the lessons learned from avant-garde artists like Georges Braque (1882-1963), Antonio Saura (1930-1998) and Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012).

In the 1990s, he worked in Vanitas, a canonical genre which had reached its peak in the Baroque period. As the art critic Teresa del Conde wrote, his works reveal “a microcosm of symbolic connotations:” mirrors, skulls, hourglasses… Everything leads to a reflection about death as a universal and absolute truth.

Argudín does not fall victim to the propensity towards pastiche characteristic of postmodern art. With joyful and indefatigable rigour, he pursues experiential and aesthetic knowledge in order to, in his own words, “open up the Pandora’s box of the secret meaning of things.” Because, as he himself states, “a key function of art, and also of philosophy, is a work of ascesis, of cleansing and therapy in relation to the material and mental consumerism of today’s landscape.”

His works have been seen in many group exhibitions, including the Salon of Mexican Fine Arts at the National Institute of Fine Arts, the National Painting Salon, and the 4th Rufino Tamayo Biennial, in Mexico City. In 1993 he obtained a Fulbright-García Robles grant as visiting artist at the University of Rochester, New York. Since 1988 he is a master at the National School of Visual Arts and at the La Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking. He imparts courses and lectures in Mexico and other countries.