Avenida Río Churubusco No 79, Calzada de Tlalpan, Col. Country Club, 04220 CDMX, Mexico
Lilia Carrillo was a student of the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda", Mexico City, from 1947. She graduated with honours in 1951.
Gallery of Lilia Carrillo
14 Rue de la Grande Chaumière, 75006 Paris, France
Carrillo attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where she learned about avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism and various forms of abstract art.
Avenida Río Churubusco No 79, Calzada de Tlalpan, Col. Country Club, 04220 CDMX, Mexico
Lilia Carrillo was a student of the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda", Mexico City, from 1947. She graduated with honours in 1951.
14 Rue de la Grande Chaumière, 75006 Paris, France
Carrillo attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where she learned about avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism and various forms of abstract art.
Lilia Carrillo was a Mexican artist and stage designer of the early 20th century. She was a representative of the Art Informel movement. Carrillo was trained in the traditional style but her work began to evolve away from it after studying in Paris in the 1950s.
Background
Carrillo was born in Mexico City, Mexico, on November 2, 1930. She was the only child of General Francisco Carrillo, a pilot, and Socorro García. Her father abandoned the family when Lilia Carrillo was a little girl and her mother raised her alone.
Education
In her childhood, Lilia Carrillo wanted to be an astronomer. From an early age, she was surrounded by intellectuals, artists and poets who frequently visited her home in Colonia Roma, Mexico City. Her mother was a close friend of María Asúnsolo and was in good terms with Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Carlos Pellicer and Juan Soriano.
When Carrillo was a teenager, she decided to become a painter. Her mother hired her friend Manuel Rodríguez Lozano to teach her daughter. Soon after, Rodríguez Lozano helped Lilia Carrillo to enter the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda", Mexico City, in 1947. She graduated with honours in 1951. Her studies under the direction of Rodríguez Lozano and La Esmeralda were purely academic and based on the Mexican School of Painting.
While in school, the artist participated in a mural at the former Monastery of San Diego. Soon she fell from the scaffolding, injuring her back. Although she managed to recover, it is possible that this was the source of her future ailment.
In 1953 she received a scholarship to study in Paris. Carrillo attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where she learned about avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism and various forms of abstract art.
Carrillo's first professional exhibitions were held in Paris, at the Maison du Mexique and the Foreign Artists Exhibition in 1954. She left Paris for Mexico in 1956, where she became a teacher and began to exhibit her works in Europe. She held a number of exhibits at the Galería Antonio Souza between 1957 and 1961 and then at the Galería Juan Martin from 1963 to 1970, both in Mexico City.
Major exhibits during that period of time included the Gallery of the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C., in 1960, and VI Tokyo Biennal in 1961. She was a member of the new Generación de la Ruptura artist movement, which had trouble selling paintings in established venues. So she turned to Mexican handcrafts and folk art to make money to survive. In 1962 she traveled to Peru with her family to present her works at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo. On this occasion, Lilia Carrillo met Peruvian vanguard artists such as Fernando de Szyszlo.
Lilia Carrillo participated in the Arte Actual de América y España exhibition in 1963, the Casa del Lago in Mexico City in 1964, Pintura Contemporánea de México exhibition at the Casa de las Américas in Havana in 1966. Besides, the artist took part in the inaugural exhibition of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1964. During the 1960s she also produced set and costume design for various productions by Alexandro Jodorowsky.
The 1969 was an extremely productive year for her. Carrillo's artworks appeared in shows in Puerto Vallarta, Paris and at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. By that time, she had participated in numerous collective exhibitions, including those held in Mexico City, St. Louis, Oregon, San Diego, Portland, Austin, Texas, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, and Barranquilla.
In addition to painting, Lilia Carrillo became a co-founder of the Galería Antonio Souza together with Juan Soriano, Rufino Tamayo, Gerzso and Manuel Felguérez. It supported Generación de la Ruptura artists. She also was a founding member of the Salón Indepedendiente in Mexico City.
In 1970 she painted a mural for the Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. At the end of the year, she suffered a spinal aneurysm and was hospitalized. As a result, she returned home in a wheelchair; it kept her from painting until 1973. She started to paint again but less than she did before. A mobile easel was created to help her paint again. She created works for the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Museo de Rufino Tamayo. The latter bought the second painting in advance in order to help her with the hospital bills. Lilia Carrillo also produced five paintings for the Galería Ponce and one for the Galerái Juan Martín. Just before her death in 1974 she left a large painting incompleted.
Juan García Ponce: "Lilia Carrillo is essentially a lyric artist, her paintings are placed in a natural way within this group of works whose poetic essence, always closer to the field of singing than to that of the concept, escapes any attempt at interpretation. Immediately his painting tends partly to create a distance rather than an identification, its ethereal, delicate quality, its exceptional subtlety, seem to contradict rather than support his treatment of the materials, forcing them to go unnoticed, to be lost in the totality without precise limits of the picture."
Connections
Carrillo's first husband was Ricardo Guerra. The marriage ended in divorce in 1956. In 1960 she remarried Manuel Felguérez, an abstract artist. Lilia Carrillo had two children, Ricardo and Juan Pablo.