Bajo el cielo de Mexico—Gabriel Figueroa: Fifty Years of Art & Film

From the early 1930s through the early 1980s, the Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (1907–1997) helped forge an evocative and enduring image of Mexico, its history, its landscape and its people. Among the most important cinematographers of the so-called Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, Figueroa worked with leading directors from Mexico, the United States and Europe—traversing a wide range of genres while maintaining his distinctive and vivid visual style. In the 1930s, Figueroa joined a vibrant context of photographers, filmmakers, painters, printmakers and muralists—including Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, Edward Weston and Manuel Alvarez Bravo—who sought to convey the symbolic significance of the country’s transformation after the scarring battles of the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. Later, he adapted his approach to the very different sensibilities of directors Luis Buñuel and John Huston, among others. Figueroa spoke of creating una imágen méxicana. His films are an essential part of the network of appropriations, exchanges and reinterpretations that formed Mexican visual identity and visual culture in the mid-twentieth century and beyond.

The exhibition features film clips, paintings, photographs, posters and documents many of which are drawn from Figueroa’s archive, now owned by the Televisa Foundation. In addition, the exhibition will include works by contemporary artists and filmmakers that draw from the vast inventory of distinctly Mexican imagery associated with Figueroa’s cinematography.

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