Marysole Wörner Baz

Already as a 15-year-old prodigy, Marysole Wörner Baz was characterized, in her person and her work, as a free, charitable, rebellious, self-taught, sensitive, determined, inquisitive, expressive, melancholy, generous, humorous, communitarian-minded, justice-seeking individual. She revealed in her work the deep hollows of life and how to overcome them. In the beginning it was draftsmanship, the texture of paper, charcoal, ink, and pencil. After she refused to continue her schooling, her father only allowed her to devote herself to art if she also took charge of the household kitchen. A household where drawing and painting were already well established, with her uncles Emilio and Ben-Hur Baz Viaud and her brother, the architect Juan Wörner Baz. Liquid materials flowed in her earliest paintings—a simile of the alcohol that temporarily detoured her. Her final recovery meant to open the field to light, to color, to life and thus began her impastos and her parallel experiences in sculpture and print-making. Sea green-blue landscapes, cacti, and rain are interlaced in this artist's hands. Characters inhabit her paintings and her spaces, or create an infinitude of empty chairs. Her exploration of the three-dimensional expands into stone and granite, bronze and wire rod. Slowly, sculpture motivates the artist to synthesize of techniques. With railroad nails and metal laminates, Marysole Wörner Baz was to create two unique periods in contemporary Mexican sculpture and a contribution to international language. In Dar en el clavo, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes's museum, she brought into three-dimensional space the draftsmanship that marked her path since adolescence. Bicycle-riding children, workers, acrobats, crucifixions, all in black nails, welded and patina-coated. Soldering fire was also her instrument in performance art. Monumental wire-rod chairs, prepared with an incendiary charge, with Marysole, tiny tamer of shapes, always expert in her control of the flame. Also in wire rod her children, inhabitants of the courtyard of the artist's home in Cicerón. Geometric inventiveness gave concrete shape to one of her greatest aspirations: I want to have my work move, and even when it is placed in a museum, for people to touch and enjoy it. Thus, Todo se mueve, initially on exhibit at Museo del Chopo. Two challenges confronted Marysole in her first contact with wood as a material in monumental and small formats. I invited her, anticipating that wood would become one of her great companions. She arrived in Toluca for the Encuentro Internacional de Escultura en Madera armed only with her mass and some gouges. As soon as she saw her colleagues handling the machinery used for large formats, she bought an electric saw, which she immediately named her mature-age companion. Similarly, an invitation to participate in a show for the visually impaired launched her in the creation of books, rolls, and newspaper heaps in a wide variety of woods. I want for everyone to touch and feel these shapes… Every year, the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration returned her to popular traditions with magnificent fixed and mobile characters in papier mâché, cardboard, wire structure, and industrial paint. Marysole Wörner Baz always devoted time to preparing surprising characters for this celebration. This is how she formulated her installation for the Hacienda galleries. Some of those works were part of exhibitions like Retro-prospectiva at the Museo Nacional de la Muerte, in Aguascalientes, and its traveling version in Xalapa. There, the artist extended her passage through Veracruz in order to remember and celebrate the ocean, which she had not seen in decades. Born in Mexico City, she escaped to Europe to discover art and traversed the continent with her friend Remedios Varo, having established a lifelong connection to Adelita Fern&aac...