Rufino Tamayo (Mexican, 1899-1991) was a painter, muralist, sculptor and graphic artist who was recognized as a key figure in Mexican post-revolutionary art from the 1920s onward, with a distinctive style that set him apart from the more politically explicit work of contemporaries like Diego Rivera. Tamayo’s continuous experimentation with new materials and techniques led his work to maintain relevance to the artistic scene of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Luis and Lea Remba owned a prestigious Mexico City print shop that transitioned into a fine art workshop in 1968. To cement their reputation, they reached out to Tamayo to collaborate on a series of print runs in 1973. The artist had been working with the graphic arts since 1925 and over the years partnered with a variety of different workshops. However, he had always wanted to use a three-dimensional paper printing process that captured the texture of his paintings, so Tamayo challenged Luis Remba, a master printmaker and engineer, to create one to earn the commission.

Mixografía is the result of this challenge—both a new medium and the Rembas’ rebranded workshop. Named for its ability to seamlessly blend media together, the technique uses a mold to bend paper to the will of the artist, creating prints which incorporate qualities associated with both painting and sculpture. Between 1973 and his death in 1991, Tamayo collaborated with Luis to create a body of over 80 previously unimaginable prints with this new process.

This exhibition looks at how the collaborative efforts of an artist and an engineer gave birth to an entirely new graphic medium. It explores the ways in which this body of work puts into play its distinctive possibilities of textural and technical experimentation and Tamayo’s concise visual vocabulary to address aspects such as gesture and humor, race and Mexican identity, unrest and existentialism.

Monologue is an ironic subject for the first true Mixografía ever created. Both the title and the subject matter refer to a single, self-sufficient voice, whereas with this work Tamayo and Luis celebrated a new, successful collaboration between a mature, prestigious artist and a master craftsman.  Print technicians as a rule do not consider themselves artists, but Luis’ solutions to mechanical and industrial problems have a silent beauty to them. This first Mixografía print, and all to come, are the result of hours of creative dialogue between these two professionals.

The first print Tamayo and Luis collaborated on, Tremulous Woman, is a lithograph with no elements of Mixografía whatsoever. It was not until later in the same year that Luis solved the new medium’s early engineering problems and that Cosmic Ecstasy was made with the print featuring a textured splatter running upwards through its center. After this the metamorphosis happened practically overnight. Distinct forms that had once been differentiable by color alone were suddenly liberated to explore a third dimension like a butterfly that has emerged from its cocoon.

The richness of texture that Luis’ Mixografía created allowed Tamayo to revisit figures that he had been painting throughout his career. As he became comfortable working in the new medium it allowed him to incorporate a new expressive dimension in the depiction of his prints' human figures. Originally inspired by Cubist greats like Picasso and a reimagining of pre-Columbian sculptural forms, Tamayo's geometric, sign-like representations of women, men and children—simultaneously devoid of expression and wrought with emotion—epitomize his ability to create nuanced characters with apparently simple means. 

Despite critics and scholars being quick to emphasize Tamayo’s indigenous heritage, the artist recognized both his Zapotec and European roots. Much of the homage he paid to his ancestry took the very tangible form of icons used by his ancestors, but individual works also speak to race being at the forefront of Tamayo’s thought process. Pairings like White Hand and Black Hand exist in opposition to one another: the white hand is lost deep within a hellish tempest, whereas the disembodied black hand is either being venerated on a pedestal or displayed as a disturbing trophy.

When it was printed in 1979, Two Figures was almost twice the size of the previously largest Mixografía. The subject is strangely lacking in rhetoric for such a heroic accomplishment. The print depicts two figures awkwardly standing beside one another, each touching their own body, yet symbolically unified by a ghostlike golden aura between them. The success of Tamayo’s earlier Mixografía prints had already drawn other artists to the fledging three-dimensional process. Each artist brought unique challenges for Luis Remba to solve, and each of Luis’ hard-earned solutions demonstrated just how much could be accomplished by two figures putting their heads together.

With multiple runs of up to 300 prints each, these small invitations posed a logistical challenge to Mixografía’s standard practice of quality over quantity. These works were made for two occasions: a 1974 retrospective exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the 1981 opening of the then brand-new Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.

Tamayo’s Mixografías include many of the traditionally Mexican icons he used throughout his career. True to his poetic nature, he explored the formal qualities of these images to capture their subtleties and invite multiple levels of their interpretation rather than presenting them as stereotypes. His abstractions of still life elements and animals recall the sensory and symbolic richness of Mexican flora and fauna and function as parts of rhythmic geometric compositions. Watermelons simultaneously references the fruit found in Mexican market stalls and his own paintings dating back to the 1920s but is also reminiscent of a Cheshire-cat-like grin. As evidenced by Quetzalcoatl and Estela, Tamayo used pre-Columbian subjects to create works with similarly suggestive qualities.

The ability of Mixografía to capture the minute details of textures like charred wood, corrugated cardboard, stucco and burlap made working with Luis not just a process, but one of Tamayo’s greatest pleasures. After the Rembas’ workshop closed its doors for the day, the seasoned artist entered and began the night’s work of manipulating objects with atypical surfaces until he fashioned a model he was happy with. Man at the Window is among Tamayo’s most striking Mixografía prints. The idea came to the artist when he found an interesting piece of plastic packaging discarded on a Parisian street and thought it resembled a window. 

In 1980 Tamayo proposed the creation of the world’s largest print. Eager to undertake the task, Luis began the slow process of sourcing the required four-ton lithographic stone and redesigning the Mixografía equipment to accommodate the print's record-breaking dimensions. The finished artwork, Two Personages Attacked by Dogs, represents the peak of the collaboration between Mixografía and Tamayo. The Rembas and Tamayos played cards in the evenings, vacationed together and less than a year after the mural-sized print was completed Tamayo painted The Blondie, a portrait of Luis made for the Rembas’ 25th anniversary. The novel process not only expanded the possibilities of graphic media, it built a friendship.

Tamayo generally left the significance of his works open to the interpretation of critics, but he explained his motivations for creating prints such as Two Personages Attacked by Dogs to Luis: the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation, the threat of terrorism, a growing awareness of an environmental crisis, and more. Many of the same vicious creatures represented in the scenes of fire and horror that Tamayo painted around World War II return here to torment man. Other works show figures burdened by grief, shame and madness with rare glimmers of hope shining through the encroaching darkness.

Tamayo used celestial bodies, saturated colors, and lines of force to express metaphysical and existential reflections in his work long before the moon landing in 1969, but these elements seem to gain intensity after Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man.” The fundamental forms of the moon and sun, whether depicted as circles or adorned with human faces as in Mexico’s traditional lotto game, suggest a range of possibilities in our complex relationship with the cosmos. Other prints grapple with a variety of philosophical subjects. In Clock Without Time Tamayo uses the imagery of an empty timepiece and a repeated infinity sign to meditate on the endless and unknowable qualities of time and space. 

In 1984, the Remba family moved to Los Angeles to manage a new Mixografía workshop on Adams Boulevard. When Tamayo made the trip to see the Rembas he was upset, telling Luis, “You are too well established here. You will never return home.” Ultimately, Tamayo was right. He had grown accustomed to spending his evenings carving wax molds and building maquettes in the Mexico City workshop, and although this move did not constitute the end of his working relationship with the Rembas, a major part of his life for the past decade had packed up and walked out on him. 

Throughout the latter half of the 1980s the Rembas continued to operate their Mexico City studio under the direction of a friend. Now though, instead of making upwards of 17 print runs with Tamayo per year, each project required significant planning and that the Rembas return to Mexico City to work with the aging artist. Between 1984 and Tamayo’s death in 1991, Mixografía created only one print per year with Tamayo. 

Tamayo’s last prints seem to lament the distance that had come between himself and Luis. Two Brothers and the cosmically charged final Mixografía print, Moon and Sun, suggest his embrace of the partnership that he had originally encountered with skepticism in his first print with the Rembas. At the end of Tamayo’s life, the editions that the artist and engineer produced together made them brothers in a joint artistic venture. Like the complementary relationship of the moon and sun, the process and works they created together generated a creative synergy that opened up countless possibilities for following generations. Today, long after Tamayo’s passing, Mixografía continually revitalizes the dream that Rufino Tamayo and Luis Remba made a reality by providing artists with an ever-evolving platform for the expression of contemporary concerns through graphic exploration.