Background
Goeritz was born in Danzig, Germany (now Gdańsk, Poland), on April 4, 1915.
1957
Luis Barragán and Mathias Goeritz.
1957
Teotihuacan, Mexico
Mathias Goeritz in Teotihuacan in 1957.
From 1934 to 1940 Mathias Goeritz studied philosophy and the history of art at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (present-day Humboldt University of Berlin) in Berlin.
Portrait of the artist.
Mathias Goeritz.
Mathias Goeritz in his later years.
Portrait of Mathias Goeritz.
Goeritz was born in Danzig, Germany (now Gdańsk, Poland), on April 4, 1915.
Mathias Goeritz grew up in Berlin. Since 1934 he studied philosophy and the history of art at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (present-day Humboldt University of Berlin) in Berlin. He received a doctorate in art history from this institution in 1940. His doctoral dissertation on the nineteenth-century German artist Ferdinand von Rayski was published under the title Ferdinand Von Rayski und die Kunst des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Concurrently, Goeritz also studied art under Max Kaus and Hans Orlowski at the Berlin-Charlottenberg School of Arts and Crafts.
Goeritz held a position at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie (National Gallery), now the Alte Nationalgalerie, under the direction of Paul Ortwin Rave, a nineteenth-century art specialist. In early 1941 Goeritz left Germany to escape World War II. He settled first in Tetuan, Morocco, and after the end of the war in 1945, he moved to Granada, Spain.
Mathias Goeritz's career as a professional painter began with his first one-man exhibit at the Librería-Galería Clan in Madrid in June 1946. He presented his artworks under the pseudonym "Ma-Gó". He relocated with his family to Madrid in 1947. There, the artist became a close friend of Spanish sculptor Ángel Ferrant.
Goeritz and Ferrant travelled to visit the prehistoric paintings of the Cave of Altamira in the north of Spain in the summer of 1948, along with writer Ricardo Gullón and some other artists. It was during this period of time that Goeritz helped found the Escuela de Altamira (Altamira School), an association of artists and writers who would meet annually near the Cave. The Escuela de Altamira would ultimately hold two meetings, in 1949 and 1950.
In the year of 1949, Mathias Goeritz settled in Mexico and became a professor of visual education and drawing at the Escuela de Arquitectura of the Universidad de Guadalajara, through the invitation of the school’s director, architect Ignacio Díaz Morales. He taught there until 1954. Of singular importance was his creation of a museum in Mexico City, the Museo Experimental El Eco, which operated from 1951 to 1953 and had both a national and an international impact.
In 1953 he presented his "Manifiesto de la Arquitectura Emocional" (Emotional Architecture Manifesto) at the pre-inauguration of the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, which he designed in 1952-1953.
On moving to Mexico City in 1954, Goeritz continued to teach and entered his extremely productive period, particularly with his sculpture. Goeritz collaborated with Luis Barragán to create monumental abstract sculptures in reinforced concrete during the 1950s, including El animal del Pedregal (The Animal of the Pedregal, 1951) for the Jardines del Pedregal de San Angel in Mexico City, and the Torres de la Ciudad Satélite (Towers of Satellite City, 1957) for the Ciudad Satélite in Mexico state. During the same period, he produced a series of massive and roughly completed sculptures in wood, such as Moses (1956; Jerusalem).
After the death of his wife in 1958, Goeritz became severely depressed, and his work became bitter, aggressive and hard. In 1958-1959 he made the first of a series of mural-sized objects called Messages (1968; Mexico City, Hotel Camino Real) from metal sheets and nails, and he turned towards spirituality by designing liturgical objects and decorations, in particular, the stained-glass windows of Cuernavaca Cathedral (1961).
In 1961 Goeritz took part at the Galería Antonio Souza in a group exhibition, Los hartos, for which he published another manifesto. José Luis Cuevas and Pedro Friedeberg also participated there. They all were instrumental in establishing abstraction and other modern trends in Mexico. Mathias Goeritz carried out a great number of works, including easel paintings, prints, and sculptures during this time. His outstanding sculptures of this period included the Mixcoac Pyramid (1969) at the Unidad Habitacional Lomas de Plateros in Mexico City and his collaboration with Helen Escobedo, Manuel Felguérez, Hersúa, Sebastián and Federico Silva on the Espacio Escultórico (1979; Mexico City), a large outdoor sculptural complex at the Ciudad Universitaria on the outskirts of Mexico City.
Thanks to his foreign contacts Mathias Goeritz was able to have commission sculptures in Mexico by well-known foreign artists. For instance, he created a series of 18 works known as La ruta de la amistad (1968) in Mexico City. He also made regular contributions to the monthly ‘Sección de arte’ in the periodical Arquitectura/México between 1959 and 1978.
Mathias Goeritz married photographer Marianne Gast in 1942.