Ivo Mesquita in an Interview:

"In Latin America, the artistic involvement with the colonial past also meant a critical involvement with the all-embracing model of modernism, which also brought about a return to the 'Giants' of Europe." The Brazilian curator Ivo Mesquita on local pictorial traditions, the reception of the German Neo-Expressionists in Latin America, and future generations of painters.



God is an image, too:

In contrast to the raw and edgy Neo-Expressionsim of the Heftige Malerei movement in Germany, the artists of the Italian Transavanguardia conquered the art world with magical symbols of fantastic scenes and poetic compositions. In returning to figurative painting, they also discovered myths and intuitive powers.
By Maria Morais



At the moment, it seems as though figurative painting were undergoing a revival worldwide. The exhibition The Return of the Giants - German Painting from 1975-1985, which is currently being shown in the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City on its Latin American tour, was already a huge public success at its first station in Monterrey. What makes German painting from the nineteen-eighties so popular in Latin America? We asked the Brazilian curator and art critic Ivo Mesquita about the relationship between Latin American artists and German painting from the seventies and eighties. Giants and Alchemists: It wasn't only "Heftige Malerei" that experienced a breakthrough worldwide in the early eighties; the neo-expressive paintings of the Italian Transavanguardia aroused international attention and were presented together with the German "Wilden." Maria Morais has taken the Mexico City exhibition as an opportunity to have a closer look at the magical symbols and fantastic scenes of the Transavanguardia and introduces examples from the collection of the Deutsche Bank.