José Clemente Orozco: The Final Cut

The ASU Art Museum presents an important exhibition of late work by José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), a pioneering artist who founded the Mexican Mural Renaissance with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. “The Final Cut” is the first solo exhibition by Orozco in Arizona. Orozco’s bold murals were the most complex of Los Tres Grandes and prominently featured universal themes of human experience and modernization. Orozco is one of the most significant artists to come out of Mexico in the 20th century, although largely underrecognized in the United States. He was born in Jalisco and returned to Guadalajara to paint his masterpiece, “The Man on Fire,” in the Hospicio Cabañas, one of the oldest hospital complexes in Latin America. A World Heritage site, it is known as the “Sistine Chapel” of Latin America. Beginning in 1922, Orozco painted more than seven major murals in Mexico and the U.S., including three completed in the 1940s.

Through a collaboration with the Orozco family in Guadalajara, the exhibition will include works of art late in the artist’s career. Many of these works from the 1940s have never been seen in the U.S. and illustrate the artist’s career-long interests in human history and politics, surrealism, symbolism, abstraction and the human form. The exhibition’s moveable works will reveal Orozco’s creative process and how he worked through the ideas and formal problems that appeared in his site-specific, monumental murals. The collective work will also consider what an artist’s last work can show about their progression and how it reflects upon or departs from their body of work. A catalog published by Temblores Publicaciones will accompany this exhibition with new scholarship written about his final years.

“José Clemente Orozco: The Final Cut” is supported by the Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation and sponsored by the Andrew B. Kim & Wan Kyun Rha Kim Family Foundation.

The accompanying exhibition catalog is funded by the Andrew B. Kim & Wan Kyun Rha Kim Family Foundation and produced in association with Temblores Publicaciones, the publishing house of Terremoto Magazine.

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Image credit: José Clemente Orozco, “Skull with Feathers,” 1947, Pyroxylin on Masonite, 48 × 45 in. Courtesy of the Orozco Family.