Eduardo Terrazas

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new abstract works by the Mexican artist Eduardo Terrazas (b. 1936, Guadalajara, Mexico) at the New York gallery, his first New York exhibition in three years. The exhibition will consist of work from his longest-running and most significant series, Possibilities of a Structure (subseries Cosmos), and a new series entitled Cosmic Variations, in which Terrazas expands his vision of the universe through striking new circular, rectangular and diamond-shaped canvas formations.

An artist, architect, designer and urban planner, Eduardo Terrazas is a polymath who has pursued a vocabulary of geometric purity and harmony in every facet of his work. Since 1974, he has explored questions relating to the mysteries of the cosmos and our place within it through a dazzlingly vibrant series of abstract yarn paintings characterized by their conceptual rigor and entrancing tactility.

A ritual asceticism underpins Terrazas’s work, in which ideas of the local and the global converge. Each work in his oeuvre is crafted in multi-colored shades of Italian yarn, applied in Campeche wax to a wooden board in a painstaking process which requires around three to four weeks to complete. Designed in a simple grid structure embedded with intersecting circles and squares, Terrazas’s Modernist-influenced abstractions recall planar compositions painted by Kazimir Malevich, who like Terrazas sought to visualize outer space and the universe through a stark new language of absolute geometries.

Terrazas began the Possibilities of a Structure series in the early 1970s, after becoming immersed in Mexican folk art while installing the 1961 exhibition Masterworks of Mexican Art at The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, which later traveled to The Petit Palais, Paris in 1962. Drawn to the tabla, a type of yarn painting found among the indigenous Huichol people of Sierra Madre Occidental, the technique became a pillar of his lifelong work. Terrazas’s own abstractions are laid out in warm, glowing shades of orange, blue, cadmium yellow and magenta pink that invoke this tradition of the local, paying homage to the bright shades found in traditional Mexican art and architecture.

While the Huichol people used the tabla to narrate scenes of the peyote, animal, corn and cosmological deities that figure in their religious system, in his own work Terrazas uses the structure of the yarn grid as an allegory for the composition of his Cosmos, allowing him to explore a lifetime’s worth of questions about the nature of the universe through the microcosm of the canvas. At the center of each work, a large circle embodies the Earth, surrounded by parallel lines and shapes shooting outwards and diagonal formations. These allude to the connections between the stars, Earth and planets, but can also be seen as a metaphor for the structure of local communities and society as a whole. The title of Possibilities of a Structure suggests at once a curiosity in the fabric of our universe and a profoundly human hope for an underlying rationality behind the chaos of the world.

Born in 1936 in Guadalajara, Mexico, Eduardo Terrazas is a multidisciplinary artist and architect internationally recognized for his contributions to the landscape of contemporary Mexican art and architecture. For over fifty years, he has practiced a method of geometric abstraction inspired by ancient Huichol yarn painting techniques in addition to Ancient Greek and Renaissance geometric systems.

After studying architecture in Mexico, Terrazas earned a Master of Architecture from Cornell University before working as an architect in Paris with Candilis, Josic & Woods. In the 1960s, Terrazas taught architecture at Columbia University and Berkeley before returning to Mexico City. He designed the now-iconic Olympics logotype for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, a series of concentric circles still used today.

Terrazas first exhibited his work in 1972 at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City. The following year was marked with exhibitions at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile and at the Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz, Bolivia. He was included in two exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Word and Image (1968) and Graphics 1: New Dimensions (1970). He participated in the Biennale de Paris at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1969. Most recently, his work has been included in Un lugar en dos dimensiones: A selection of works in the Jumex Collection at Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico (2014); the Sharjah Biennial II in 2013; and Poule! at the Fundación Jumex, Mexico City (2012).

Terrazas has been featured in dozens of solo exhibitions worldwide at institutions and galleries such as Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2020); Museo El Eco, Mexico City (2019), Timothy Taylor, New York (2018); Nils Staerk, Copenhagen (2017) and the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2015).