Luis nishizawa biography

Luis Nishizawa, n.

These roots of ancestral and geographically opposed peoples were a determining factor in his painting.

His artistic training began around 1942, the year he entered the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico City, formerly known as the Academia de San Carlos, at a time when mural painting with a strong nationalist accent was in his apogee.

In 1925 his family moved to Mexico City where he worked on jewelry while studying music with professor Rodolfo Halfer before being admitted to the legendary Academia San Carlos. Began art studies at the Academy of San Carlos, 1942. This mural was rescued after the 1985 earthquake and relocated in the lobby of the 21st Century National Medical Center.

Close contact with nature and the countryside during his childhood, had a profound influence on his sensibility and was later an important factor in his artistic work.

The influence of his Japanese and Mexican roots, two ancestral and artistic cultures, has been significant on his work, which radiates beauty and transmits emotion through color and diversity of form. He obtained the Master of Arts degree in 1947 and started his teaching career in the National College of Fine Arts, duty that he still carries out today contributing his knowledge and technique to countless generations of young artists in a generous, wise and stimulating exchange.

In 1969, he made the mural A Song to Life, for the Celaya Social Security Unit, in which he used for the first time high-temperature ceramics in irregular cuts according to design. Luis Nishizawa was made Professor Emeritus and Doctor Honoris Causa by the National University of Mexico, Latinamerica's largest and oldest university, and received the National Arts Prize.

In his long artistic path he has expressed himself in many languages: murals, painting, drawing, ceramics, glass and sculpture. The Japanese Government named him Sacred Treasure of the Dragon, member of its Academy of Arts and Artistic Creator of its National Arts and Culture Council. With extraordinary talent and frequent great mastery, this work shows a manifest desire to surpass the realism of the past ...

In his works the two cultural currents that nourish him are substantially manifested: the Mexican, in its reality, and the Japanese, of fine lines and poetic oriental expression.

In the first half of the 1950’s his work was very attached to the theme and style of the Mexican School of Painting, he made pictures representing the customs of the rural people and indigenous communities.

During the five years he studied, he had distinguished teachers such as Julio Castellanos, José Chávez Morado, Alfredo Zalce and the Spanish refugee Antonio Rodríguez Luna, among others. Nishizawa followed the path of the Japanese master. Although, he also painted still lifes and landscapes, this last genre would be the one he mainly developed and in which he achieved his greatest recognition.

In 1951, Luis Nishizawa exhibited paintings and ink drawings in his first solo exhibition at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana; after such an event, his works soon caught the attention of art critics.

In 1963, he studied metal engraving with the Japanese engravers Yukio Fukuzawa and Ichikowa. In Mexico he practiced Taku Hon with the Japanese artist Toneyama on pre-Hispanic reliefs (tombstones, lintels and jambs) of the Mayan area.