Lyrical informal abstractionism Lilia Carrillo

Lilia Carrillo (1930–1974) was a Mexican painter from the Generación de la Ruptura, which broke with the Mexican School of Painting of the early 20th century. She was trained in the traditional style but her work began to evolve away from it after studying in Paris in the 1950s. While she and husband abstract artist Manuel Felguérez struggled to get their work accepted, even selling Mexican handcrafts and folk art to survive, she eventually had her canvas work exhibited large venues in Mexico City and various cities in the world. Her work was part of the inaugural exhibition of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1964. After her death in 1974, her work received honors from the Palacio de Bellas Artes and has been exhibited in various venues.

 Encouraged by Juan Soriano to explore other kinds of painting, in 1953, she received a scholarship to study in Paris, moving their with her new husband Ricardo Guerra. She enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, learning about avant-garde movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism and various forms of abstract art. However, she guarded about these movements at first.
She returned to Mexico in 1956 after separating from Guerra In 1960, she married Mexican abstract artist Manuel Felguérez in Washington, DC.Both were of the new Generación de la Ruptura artist movement, which had trouble selling paintings in established venues. Carrillo and Felguérez turned to Mexican handcrafts and folk art to make money to survive. Carrillo had two children to support as well, prompting her to take on a Czechoslovakian persona of “Felisa Gross” to produce purely for commercial purposes.In 1962, she traveled to Peru with Felguérez to exhibit her work at the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo. On this occasion, she met Peruvian vanguard artists such as Fernando de Szyszlo.

 While Carrillo was studying at La Esmeralda, she rejected abstract art, with her work heavily influenced by the dominant Mexican School of painting. Her very early work is figurative such as her self-portrait from 1950.After she graduated Juan Soriano encouraged her to explore other artistic trends and she went to Paris. There Here she became to experiment with Cubism, influenced by Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso, and the Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism and abstract art movements in general. When she returned to Mexico in the mid-1950s, her work was already showing influence from abstract art.
In the 1950s she became an adherent of automatism, a theory introduced to Mexico by Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen. It is based on Surrealism and posits that the artist’s hand should be guided by its own movement in order to tap the subconscious. She then moved onto her own abstract style which has been classified as “lyrical informal abstractionism” or “informal expressionism.” She never rejected the labels but always insisted that she did not have a real method for creating her works, or if she did, it changed often. Wikipedia