Concepción Aguilar
At first glance, the dusty little town of Ocotlan de Morelos near Oaxaca has little more to offer than other Mexican towns. But behind the walls of this unassuming little town, Mexican art history has been written for decades. For one thing, Ocotlan was the birthplace and later place of work of the famous painter Rodolfo Morales. Morales was known for his colorful surrealistic, dreamlike canvases and collages and became world-famous in the mid-1970s after he was introduced to the general public by the old Mexican master Rufino Tamayo. After more than a decade of teaching and traveling in the name of his art, he returned to his hometown in the mid-1980s, where he devoted himself exclusively to painting until his death in 2001. He invested his money in the restoration of historic buildings and in a foundation that has been inspiring the town's youth with art for decades. Two of the artists we represent also learned how to handle brushes and paint from Morales: both Demetrio Garcia Aguilar and his child Fran Garcia Vasqez enjoyed the completely free workshops as kids in the home of the generous painter of world fame, which had been converted into a cultural center.
Which brings this little digression full circle and brings us to the second heavyweight of Ocotlan's art scene - the Aguilar family. Their preferred medium is red clay, which is abundantly available around the town. The family dynasty was founded by Isaura Alcantara Diaz and her husband Jesus Aguila Revilla. In the 1950s, the two began to add decorative clay figurines to the range of traditional pottery for domestic use for which Ocotlan de Morelos had previously been known. These figurines depicted everyday life in Ocotlan with unusual attention to detail for the time and, due to their proximity to the art mecca of Oaxaca, soon became sought-after prey for early collectors of Mexican folk art. One such collector was the billionaire Nelson Rockefeller, who made frequent visits to Ocotlan in the 1960s and 1970s, usually buying up the Aguilars' entire workshop and taking it home to the States, where many of these early Aguilar pieces can still be seen today in the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Mexican Museum in San Francisco and other institutions. Collectors like Rockefeller not only bought the output of Isaura and Jesus, but also the sculptures of the couple's four daughters, who would eventually make the family name famous around the world in the following decades and help to launch the Day of the Dead art movement: her names are Guillermina, Josefina, Irene and
Concepción Aguilar
Concepción is the youngest of the famous sisters and, unlike the others, only enjoyed a brief period of maternal training, as Isaura died when Concepción was just 9 years old. Perhaps this was precisely the reason why she moved furthest away from the classic Aguilar line of all the sisters and uncompromisingly conquered new terrain. When we traveled to Ocotlan for the first time, her name was at the top of our list because Concepción Aguilar is one thing above all: a master of death. While the other Aguilar sisters, alongside Calaveras and Catrinas, continued to devote themselves extensively to the traditional motifs of their parents, Concepción staked out the claim of Day of the Dead art as her exclusive field of activity quite early on and over the decades perfected her skulls, which are predominantly minimal in gray. In contrast, she gives many of her figures small, colorful companions from the animal kingdom to symbolize the cycle of life and death. Her combined skills culminate in pieces such as the Arbol de la Muerte, which for us is still one of the most impressive things that art has to offer on Dia de los Muertos and is always honored in recurring variations as a centerpiece on the altar in our Berlin showroom.
