Javier De la Garza

(Tampico, Tamaulipas, 1954)

Author's artworks

20th-21st Century Mexican

De la Garza is a virtually self-taught artist, except for occasional classes in printmaking at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas and William Hayter’s
in Paris. A leading light in the
movement which emerged in the late 1980s, Javier de la Garza set new aesthetic paradigms that left a deep mark on the passing fashion for nationalistic paraphrasing which was to obsess a large number of young coeval painters. In Javier de la Garza’s work, the kitsch variations of the imaginary which shaped Mexican identity—featured widely in school books, the bolero genre of song and the golden era of local filmmaking—took on an ambiguous quality: a loyalty to nineteenth century academic drawing, a tribute to the sentimentalism of popular prints vilified by the avant-garde, but also a satirical intent through the recovery and contemporary re-contextualisation of an outmoded visual lexicon.

De la Garza enjoyed wide commercial success, selling everything that came from his studio. His most sought-after pieces were those depicting couples consisting of brawny Aztec men and native women with a Hollywood-like sheen, or of Zapatista men or dancers in parodies of Indigenista paintings, commercial calendars by Jesús Helguera (1910-1971) and stills by Gabriel Figueroa (1907-1997) in films by Emilio “El Indio” Fernández.

He has exhibited his work in Mexico, USA and UK and at international art fairs like ARCOmadrid in Spain and Europalia. Since 2002 Javier de la Garza is a member of Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (national system of art creators), an art association belonging to FONCA (National Endowment for Culture and Arts). He currently lives in Yautepec, Morelos, where he continues working and exhibiting his oeuvre.