The provocative Mexican artist Arturo Rivera dies

The plastic artist Arturo Rivera, in an image from 2014 Sashenka Gutiérrez / EFE

The plastic artist Arturo Rivera (Mexico City, 1945) died this Thursday at dawn due to a brain hemorrhage, as confirmed by his daughter, Emilia Rivera Mejía, on her social networks.

Rivera was 75 years old and lived in Mexico City.

The National Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico has lamented "the sensitive death of the renowned artist, who leaves a transcendent legacy in the plastic of the country."

"There are realities that would not exist if Arturo Rivera had not painted them," wrote the art critic Carlos Blas Galindo, who defined him as an artist who "broke into reality with the unconscious or not, unconfessed or not, purpose of upsetting it" .

With closed settings and opaque tones, and portraits of bodies that hide but open the depth of his gaze to the observer, Rivera managed to capture the vulnerability and darkness of his subjects through painting, engraving and sculpture.

"Rivera paints what cannot be achieved except by painting," declared Blas Galindo.

Rivera had been trained in graphics, painting and drawing at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, where he entered in 1963. Later, he specialized in screen printing at the Art City Lit School in London, where he graduated in 1974. The artist He lived for eight years in New York City, where he worked as a kitchen helper, in construction and in a paint factory while producing his work.

In 1979, the painter Max Zimmerman saw his work at the Latin American Institute on Madison Street and invited him to Germany as a professor at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art.

After a year of working with Zimmerman, Rivera returned to Mexico - where he settled until his death - invited by the Museum of Modern Art, where he exhibited for the first time in 1981. Since then, Rivera's name began to sound in the world of art. Mexican modern art and became a reference painter of the country abroad.

In 2003, Rivera was distinguished by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, México (MARCO), as a "master of 20th century Mexican art" and in 2005 he won the Grand Prize of the second Beijing International Art Biennial with an oil painting by more than three meters wide by two meters high made expressly for the meeting.

Rivera participated in numerous group exhibitions in cities such as New York, Rome, Paris, London, Munich, Berlin or Havana, and much of his work is kept in private collections in Mexico City, the United States, Switzerland and Finland.

Rivera, an innovator due to his attachment to classicism that preponded contained emotion and message over complex technique, was also considered a provocateur due to his strong criticism of the academic world and the trends of modern Mexican art.

In one of his last interviews, in 2016, he regretted the name change of his alma mater, the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de México: “And look at the brutality, it is now the Faculty of Arts and Design, which means that the painter is going to do a bachelor's, master's and doctorate, how?

If he is a doctor, will he paint better? ”He said.

True to his style, Rivera criticized in the same interview the contemporary art scene he saw in Mexico, where “everything is based on

, an object is decontextualized, a 'fantastic explanation' is found and it sells for thousands of dollars ”.

For Rivera, painting had the sole purpose of moving, as were poetry and music.

"The other is very accommodating, the other would say is design," he said.

“This comes to me, it is my origin.

And this is what I tell young people, that being original is not thinking about what has not been done, it is quite the opposite, it is a job of introspection and a lot of work to get to your origin, if you have talent, of course .

I don't look like Tamayo or anyone else.

I am me".