David Alfaro Siqueiros
Dicecream Magazine🔳David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) was a Mexican social realist painter, best known for his large murals in fresco.
Most of Siqueiros’s large murals are in government buildings in Mexico. His murals are distinguished by great dynamism and compositional movement, monumental size and vigor, sculptural treatment of forms, and a limited color range that is subordinated to dramatic effects of light and shadow.
Siqueiros and his followers produced thousands of square meters of vivid wall paintings in which numerous social, political, and industrial changes were portrayed from a left-wing perspective. He commonly used synthetic lacquer colors sprayed from paint guns in order to speed up the process of decorating large public buildings. He also did many easel paintings, the best-known of which is perhaps Echo of a Cry (1937).
As a muralist and an artist, Siqueiros believed art should be public, educational, and ideological. He painted mostly murals and other portraits of the revolution – its goals, its past, and the current oppression of the working classes.
Because he was painting a story of human struggle to overcome authoritarian, capitalist rule, he painted the everyday people ideally involved in this struggle. Though his pieces sometimes include landscapes or figures of Mexican history and mythology, these elements often appear as mere accessories to the story of a revolutionary hero or heroes (several works depict the revolutionary "masses", such as the mural at Chapultepec).
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