Rendered in rich violet and incandescent chartreuse, Tamayo’s Mujer en un interior evidences the artist’s mastery of color and texture. Craggly mountains of sand and energetic gestural scratches give way to open fields of color in this triumphant work. Emerging from a distinguished private European collects ion (and once owned by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), Mujer en un interior is a dynamic and emblematic example of Rufino Tamayo’s idiom of “Abstract Figuration.”

During the 1960s Tamayo’s career took him to Paris, where he began to synthesize Mexican, European and American modernisms, shifting from the emotionally charged narrative painting of the 1940s and 50s towards a more universal aesthetic, seeking to depict the true essence of people and objects. He sought to “formulate a new type of figure painting that was nourished equally by the aesthetics of post-revolutionary Mexico and the artistic vanguard of Europe and the United States. The eventual result of his nondescrpitive realism was a unique variant on abstract figuration, which contributed to both Mexican and International Modernism” (Diana C. Dupont, Santa Barbara).

In Mujer en un interior, Tamayo presents a pearly female nude figure, encircled by radiant fields of pure marigold, chartreuse and lilac. Where other Mexican Modernists like Diego Rivera borrowed frequently from the narratives of pre-Columbian stone carving, Tamayo instead was drawn to its plastic qualities, finding spiritual resonance in its pure, distilled geometry. Here, the three expressionless figures comprised of essential geometric forms evoke the eternality and stoicism of these ancient sculptures. Tamayo’s mastery of texture as a compositional element is in full display, as sand mixed into oil here provides both texture and optical effect. As light plays across the shimmering surface of the canvas, strident tones of emerge, causing this immutable figure to advance and retreat, joyfully and capriciously alive.