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featured artists
Arnold Belkin
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biography
(b. Calgary, Canada, 1930; d. Mexico City, 1992)
Belkin was a Jewish Canadian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor active in Mexico. He studied in Canada at the Vancouver School of Art (1944-45) and Banff School of Fine Arts (1947-8). The Socialist tendencies of his Russian immigrant parents influenced his interest in the Muralist Movement, and he moved to Mexico City when he was 18 years old. He continued his training there at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura La Esmeralda (1948-49) with Agustín Lazo and Carlos Orozco Romero, and from 1950 worked as one of a team of assistants to David Alfaro Siqueiros. In 1952 he became a Mexican citizen, and soon after began to create murals, such as The People Don't Want War (Acrylic, 2 x 2.5 meters, 1952; Mexico City, Inst. Poli. N.) and Scenes from Don Quixote (Acrylic on concrete, 1957; Cuernavaca), following these with many others in Mexico, the USA, Canada, Cuba and Nicaragua. Belkin exhibited extensively in the United States, and in 1967 was a Visiting Professor of Painting at Pratt Institute in New York City. He was also prolific as a draughtsman and easel painter, often working on a large scale, and to a lesser extent as a sculptor. Working in an Expressionist style and concentrating his attention on the human figure - sometimes contorted, flayed or treated in a robot-like manner - he treated biblical themes as well as more contemporary subjects such as the victims of Nazism or of the bombing of Hiroshima. In 1961 he and Francisco Icaza (b. 1930) founded the group Nueva Presencia, which until 1963 published five issues of a magazine under the same name.
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