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Dismantling cultural hierarchies| A prefiguration of Mexican postmodernism in Enrique Guzman's paintings

<p> This thesis argues that Mexican painter Enrique Guzm&aacute;n is a central figure in the transition between the Ruptura movement and postmodernism. Construed by many as a surrealist artist, Guzm&aacute;n employs idiosyncratic imagery not to probe inner realities, but to explore themes such as abjection and the fragmentation of self into commodity images. Inhabiting the chasm between an oppressive ultra-conservative provincial culture and the turbulent revolutionary ideology of Mexico City of the sixties and seventies, Guzm&aacute;n articulates, by fusing aesthetic categories such as, among others, the grotesque, the campy and the advertising clich&eacute; and exploring language, paradox and gaze, a deconstruction of cultural and political codes by satirizing their interlocking systems of signs and simulacra, initiating a critique of national and personal identity that will later be developed by the Neo-Mexicanists (Neomexicanistas) into a bold denouncement of sexual, socioeconomic and national marginalization.</p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:1556588
Date01 July 2014
CreatorsScott, Gabriella Boschi
PublisherThe University of Texas at San Antonio
Source SetsProQuest.com
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typethesis

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