El Occidental, Friday June 15, 2001:
The Mummies of Guanajuato arrived in Guadalajara
They are the Motivation for an Exhibition in the Galería de Arte Moderno
By María Isabel SÁNCHEZ ALDRETTE
(translated)
The exhibition entitled "The Mummies of Guanajuato " includes a series of six portraits of these mythical mummified beings realized in oil by the American painter who signs as "MG ", that become related to portraits of their living analogies, in addition to four Mexican landscapes, in the exhibition that was inaugurated last Friday night, June 8, at the Galería de Arte Moderno, on Mariano Otero Avenue #375.
MG began painting the mummies' portraits following a deeply moving visit to the Museo de Las Momias in Guanajuato.
While painting, she contemplated who they might have been and what their lives were like, the more she painted the more she noticed the similarity between her friends and acquaintances and the mummies.
MG explains, "Even knowing the 'facts' of these mummies' lives; where they lived, where they worked, their family history, how they died...their essence is still far from reach. The living visages are a reflection of that; the impossibility of knowing a soul during life, and the deepening ambiguities after death."
The mummies' portraits are painted in a style that combines expressionism and realism. The most abstract of the mummies is paired with the most realistic of the living portraits, in a painting that exudes warmth. A mummy appearing frozen in his moment of death, is compared {in its 'counterpart'} with the surrender and shivers of how MG imagines his last gasp for air. One of the "counterparts" is a self-portrait of the artist being hung by a noose.
"My self-portrait was the last painting of the pairs (mummy and living) to be completed. I had always seen the mummy as laughing at death before her time; and laughing with death at us after her demise. I planned to paint myself laughing, but something was missing, both from the painting and the series. The series needed a representation of a human's capacity to commit suicide or to kill another" added the exhibitor.
