Salvador Dalí
(1904-1989): Spanish painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and designer. After passing through phases of Cubism, Futurism and Metaphysical painting, he joined the Surrealists in 1929 and his talent for self-publicity rapidly made him the most famous representative of the movement. Throughout his life he cultivated eccentricity and exhibitionism (one of his most famous acts was appearing in a diving suit at the opening of the London Surrealist exhibition in 1936), claiming that this was the source of his creative energy. He took over the Surrealist theory of automatism but transformed it into a more positive method which he named `critical paranoia'. According to this theory one should cultivate genuine delusion as in clinical paranoia while remaining residually aware at the back of one's mind that the control of the reason and will has been deliberately suspended. He claimed that this method should be used not only in artistic and poetical creation but also in the affairs of daily life. His paintings employed a meticulous academic technique that was contradicted by the unreal `dream' space he depicted and by the strangely hallucinatory characters of his imagery. He described his pictures as `hand-painted dream photographs' and had certain favorite and recurring images, such as the human figure with half-open drawers protruding from it, burning giraffes, and watches bent and flowing as if made from melting wax (The Persistence of Memory, MOMA, New York; 1931). In 1937 Dalí visited Italy and adopted a more traditional style; this together with his political views (he was a supporter of General Franco) led Breton to expel him from the Surrealist ranks. He moved to the USA in 1940 and remained there until 1955. During this time he devoted himself largely to self-publicity; his paintings were often on religious themes (The Crucifixion of St John of the Cross, Glasgow Art Gallery, 1951), although sexual subjects and pictures centring on his wife Gala were also continuing preoccupations. In 1955 he returned to Spain and in old age became a recluse. Apart from painting, Dali's output included sculpture, book illustration, jewellery design, and work for the theatre. In collaboration with the director Luis Bunuel he also made the first Surrealist films---Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Age d'or (1930)---and he contributed a dream sequence to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). He also wrote a novel, Hidden Faces (1944) and several volumes of flamboyant autobiography. Although he is undoubtedly one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, his status is controversial; many critics consider that he did little if anything of consequence after his classic Surrealist works of the 1930s. There are museums devoted to Dali's work in Figueras, his home town in Spain, and in St Petersburg in Florida.

M. Chemiakin
Mihail Chemiakin was born in Moscow in 1943, grew up in occupied East Germany, and returned to Russia in 1957 where he was admitted to the Special High School of the Repin Academy of Art in Leningrad. He was expelled from art school for failing to conform to Socialist Realist norms, and from 1959-1971 worked as a laborer in various capacities. He was subjected to compulsory treatment at a mental institution, which was a standard way of dealing with ideological dissidents at that time. For five years he worked on the maintenance crew of the Hermitage Museum. In 1967, the artist founded the St. Petersburg Group and developed the philosophy of Metaphysical Synthesism, dedicated to the creation of a new form of icon painting based on the study of religious art of all ages and peoples. In 1971 Chemiakin was forced out of the USSR by the Soviet authorities. He settled first in France, then moved to New York City in 1981. While in Paris he edited and published Apollon-77, an almanach of post-Stalinist art, poetry and photography in which many of the “non-conformists” were first published. Chemiakin also recorded and published the first disks of gypsy singers Vladimir Poliakoff and Aliocha Dmitrievich, both of whom lived in Paris. He worked for several years with Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky, systematically recording his songs for what became a seven-record set of Vysotsky's music. Chemiakin continues to publish books and music by under-recognized artists under the aegis of the Apollon Art Research Foundation. In 1989, the return of Chemiakin's work to post-Communist Russia began with the first exhibition of his work there since his exile. Subsequently, he continued to show his work in Russia and has installed four monuments in St. Petersburg, to Peter the Great, to the Victims of Political Repressions, to the Architects and Builders of St. Petersburg, and to assassinated deputy mayor M. Manevich. Chemiakin's Cybele: Goddess of Fertility stands in New York's SoHo. A variation on the monument to Peter the Great is on permanent display in Normandy. In 1998 Chemiakin's Monument to Giacomo Casanova was installed in Venice in honor of the bicentenary of Casanova's death. Dialogue between Plato and Socrates, a memorial to Professor Harold Yuker, is installed at Hofstra University in New York; a monument to actor Savely Kramarov stands in San Francisco. Chemiakin's monument to Children - Victims of the Sins of Adults, commissioned by the city of Moscow, stands in Bolotnaya Square in the city's historic center. The research begun in the 1960s into the art of all ages and peoples has developed into a collection of millions of images organized into technical, historical and philosophical categories which has earned the artist five Honorary Doctorates and is the basis for his Institute of the Philosophy and Psychology of Art. Chemiakin's first theatrical work was at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1967. He designed a production of Shostakovich's opera-bouffe The Nose which was directed by Fialkovsky. As everyone involved knew in advance, the production was closed down by the authorities immediately after the premiere. Chemiakin's first ballet production, The Nutcracker, premiered directly across Theater Square from the Conservatory, 34 years later.

Byron Galvez
Byron Galvez was born in 1941 in Mixquiahuala, State of Hidalgo, and since very young displayed his artistic yearnings. His father, who was a merchant and farmer, was a enthusiast of literature and, also, played the violin in a local jazz band. It is in this manner that the painter naturally grew in an environment tied to culture. At 16 he decided to move to Mexico City, with a central objective: to study art at the Academy of San Carlos. It was there, between 1958 and 1962 where he studied and had as teachers, among others, the Spanish painter Antonio Rodriguez Luna, etching master Francisco Moreno Capdevila, Luis Nishizawa, Santos Balmori and Antonio Ramirez. He was shaped, as can be seen, with a generation of first rate teachers, and this motivated him to follow his vocation as a plastic artist steadily and tenaciously. Between 1962 and 1964 he pursued post-graduate studies, specializing in painting. At the same time he was a founding member of the workshop of metal sculpture of the National School of Visual Arts of the Autonomous National University of Mexico. In 1964 he assembled his first individual exhibit and since then has had over 60 in different venues in Mexico and various cities in the United States, Europe and Latin-America. His work has also been part of innumerable collective exhibits. A singular moment occurred when, being very young, the famous American actor Vincent Price bought every work of his first individual exhibit. In order for the show to go on, the artist showed his amazing creative capacity and in a week created 45 new pieces. Astounded at Byron Galvez's work, Price called him a “Mexican Picasso”. Since then he has been presented with over 15 awards and honorary tributes recognizing his vast and diverse work. Throughout his intense career as a plastic artist he participated in special programs filmed for the Office of Radio, Television and Cinematography. Traveling many times to the European continent and visiting the most important museums of the old world has been instrumental in the development of Byron Galvez's plastic schooling, he considers this activity an unavoidable formative experience it the growth of an artist. Since 1995 he is a member of the National Art and Culture Council of the State of Hidalgo, having been appointed by the governor of the state. His plastic work, which includes sculpture, etching, lithography, sketching and painting, is part of important private collections in Mexico and abroad. Among those who have written about his work we include Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna, Alejandro Aura, Berta Taracena, Santos Balmori, Pablo Fernandez Marquez, Enrique F. Gual and Margarita Nelken.

Jazzamoart
Born in Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, 1951. As a child he painted, sculpted and constructed objects. In 1969 he went to the Fine Arts National School San Carlos at the National University in Mexico City. Lover of jazz, love and art, Francisco Vazquez Estupinan, as his name appears on his birth certificate. He is a painter of sounds and emiotion. Jazzamoart has shown his work in 140 exhibitions and 55 solo exhibitions in museums in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe and Japan. Through more than 30 years, Jazzamoart has developed a very personal and strong expressionist language. The results have the critics considering him to be one of the most important creators in contemporary art. To the date, Jazzamoart has presented 220 collective exhibitions and 85 individual ones in Mexico EUA, Canada, Latin America, Europe and Japan, His work is in important public and private collections. He has collaborated in various publications, workshops, conferences and cds. Member of the National System of Creators of Arts of CONACULTA from 1993 till 2000.

Guillermo Meza
(1917-1997) In his youth Meza was apprentice in his father?s tailor shop while studying music, drawing and engraving at the Escuela Nocturna de Arte para Trabajadores. In 1937 he went to Morelia to work as an assistant to the painter Santos Balmori and studied at the Spain-Mexico School. In Mexico City he worked as salesman, mechanic, plumber, photograph, retoucher and porter. Meza showed his drawing to Diego Rivera, who sent him on to Ines Amor with an enthusiastic letter. She gave him in 1940 his first solo exhibition. In 1947 Meza worked with the Mexican Dance Academy and the following year with the Magic Lantern Players. As president of the First National Congress of Visual Artists he helped to promote the Ministry of Culture. In 1953 and 1954 he won the first prize in the Salon de la Plastica Mexicana?s national painting competition. In 1977 he designed sets and costumes for a ballet company in Norway. Meza is represented in such leading museum collections as the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His 'expressionist - surrealist' paintings, of themes often drawn from Indian mythology, associated with work of such artists as Frida Kahlo and Agustin Lazo; he also treated political themes.

Xavier Esqueda
Born in Mexico City in 1943. Self-taught painter who exhibited in the 1958 collective 35 new values of the Mexican plastic at the Seminar of Art from Mexico City. His first solo exhibitions were held in Galeria 'Antonio Souza' in 1965, and in 1967, in New York City. Won the Acquisition Painting Exhibition in the sun at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where he presented individually in 1973 and 1983, From 1976 to 1982 he lived in San Francisco, California, from where he produced exhibitions organized in Houston, Texas; Miami, Florida and Los Angeles, California. In 1990 his work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art of INBA and in 1997 he was invited to exhibit in the new house of culture 'Open House at the time "of the Autonomous Metropolitan University. His work has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions both collectively in Mexico and abroad, is a member of the National System of Creators (FONCA) of the National Council for Culture and the Arts.

Jorge Alzaga

Leonor Fini
(1907-1996) Born to an Argentine father and an Italian mother in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1908, Leonor Fini was raised in Trieste, Italy, by a mother who had fled her "overly macho" Argentinian father. She was dressed as a boy until she reached puberty to disguise her from hired kidnappers sent by her father to abduct her to Argentina. Despite this, Fini grew up in a very cultivated, well-ordered, largely female household. As a child she suffered from an eye disease which obliged her to come to terms with the world of darkness and develop an inner vision in which she visualised all kinds of fantastic images. This experience was to affect her for the rest of her personal and artistic life for, with her sight restored, she decided to become an artist and applied herself to the task with passion, determination and conviction. With no formal training, she taught herself anatomy by studying corpses in the Trieste mortuaries. She held her first exhibition in Trieste and, at 17, left the family home and settled in Milan where she held further exhibitions and enjoyed great success. Soon thereafter she moved to France where she remained for the rest of her life, eventually becoming France's most celebrated female artist. Fini never considered herself a Surrealist, though she maintained close personal relationships with several members of the group and included work in several important Surrealist exhibitions in the 1930s. Whilst she shared their interest in dreams, reverie, psychic transformation, and the poetics of suggestion and allusion, her work remained firmly rooted in the traditions of Symbolism, Metaphysics and Italian and German Romanticism. Her earliest figurative work reveals a debt to post-World War I classicism but, by the 1930s, she had evolved a highly personal and evocative symbolic figuration. This was combined with a powerful draughtsmanship in a series of complex and probing portraits. Over the next decades, she elaborated a rich, evocative, and often theatrical, visual universe in which women and animals served as carriers of powerful psychic forces. Fini adored cats (Egyptian symbols of dignity and power) and identified herself with the sphinx, the mythological hybrid of lion and woman. Both sphinx and cat imagery predominated in much of her strongest work in the 1930s, 1940s and 1960s. Fini never married and died in 1996

Kurt Larish
Few artists bring the international scene and the experiences of the holocaust to their work in the manner of Kurt Larisch. Viennese by birth, global by life experience, Mr. Larisch learned traditional painting techniques from his father, who painted miniatures, and his grandfather, a sculptor. He was among the first individuals in Austria to experiment with and produce animated films. Mr. Larisch, a holocaust survivor, lived in India after WWII where he continued to experiment with his stubbornly original themes, primarily his critical view of conformity and dehumanization of the masses, by employing tiny human figures juxtaposed against large geometric elements. One can readily recognize the composite influences of Vassarely, Escher, Mondrian and Magritte, but Larisch flaunts his definitive concepts in bold designs and with the daring use of color contrasts and subtle shadings. Of Kurt Larisch's paintings, Alphonso deNeuvillate wrote, "(he) is a master of the geometric style in its most elevated form. Kurt Larisch is a true professional, intellectually motivated and a stupendous artist!" Marked by vibrant colors, geometric forms, surrealistic imagines and optical illusions brought on by a continual foreground background interchange, these striking paintings are rare and though the artist continues to paint, his current production is seriously limited by advancing years. His highly successful one man shows in Mexico, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Panama, India, Great Britain attest to the universality of his message.

Santos Balmori
(1898-1992) knew from a very early age, all the difficulties and wonders that life offers, born in Mexico City, since he was 5 he began a long life of travel, before puberty had already lived in Spain, Chile and Argentina, in a world where many of these journeys were made to back of a donkey. Orphan mother in childhood and adolescence father, learned to find his way alone, always restless. At age 15 he went to the School of Fine Arts in Santiago de Chile, but relatives who were in charge didn't wanted him to study art, then with a great desire, he took a boat that took him to Europe and arrived in Madrid, entering the Academy of San Fernando, studied with teacher Joaquin Sorolla and Julio Romero de Torres. He also studied with Salvador Dali, Remedios Varo, Alberti and several more. He was proposed to change his residence to Rome (exclusive distinction for outstanding students from Spain), but he had to give up Mexican nationality, so he didn't accept. His concern led him to Paris where he stayed 14 years, there was all, studies, work, poverty, success, admission to L'Academie de la Grand Chaumiere, there worked under the leadership of the great sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, made textile design, posters , painting and made another important work, posters against fascism, having won international awards for these. In Paris he met Juan Gris, Vlaminck, Foujita, the Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi, who posed for a portrait, collaborated with the journalist and editor Henri Barbus in what is now the newspaper Le Monde, where Balmori did many illustrations, texts were written by Miguel de Unamuno, Maxim Gorky, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Einstein and Upton Sinclair among others. Very young he joined in marriage with the French dancer Theresa Bernard, which died a few years later affected by tuberculosis, married for the second time with the Swedish dancer Isabel Bjornstrom, who lived in Paris, exhibited his work in the Duncan gallery and then moved to Sweden, where he also held successful exhibitions. He also lived in Majorca and in northern Africa, seeking a warmer climate, because their health had been affected. Mallorca is a place where you have interesting encounters with artists and intellectuals, is also the place where he will produce a lot of work. During the Civil War, he was arrested for his anti-fascist propaganda and its collaboration with Garcia Lorca, Unamuno, and Leon Felipe, among others. In the decade of the 30's he decides to go to Mexico, where he was received with an exhibition of over 200 works in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, thanks to nationalism imposed by the Mexican School of Painting, he is rejected by his European training, only Carlos Merida supports and understands what he stands for. This forces him to devote himself to teaching, work that will develop over the next 30 years, being one of the teachers responsible for forming a complete freedom of thought and aesthetic to the rupture generation. Artists like Rodolfo Nieto, Pedro Coronel, Carlos Olachea and Juan Soriano are among his students. He had a daughter with Isabel Bjorstrom Kore , who developed symptoms of polio when she was ayoung girl, her mother took her to Sweden, where he no longer wanted to go back, Balmori found his muse in dance again and married dancer and choreographer Helena Jordan who became his partner for over 40 years. He was director of the Academy of Dance, working directly with Miguel Covarrubias and creating what is called the golden age of dance in Mexico. Never stoped drawing, but actually returned to painting the day he retired as a teacher. Balmori wrote the book "Mesura Aurea", a study of the golden section and "The Drawing plastic expression", both published by the Mational University of Mexico (U. N. A. M.), he also left many texts, essays and poems. Of his work humanist, there is a lot to say, always participated for just causes, opposing dictatorship and tyranny, his trench was the poster. He was the founder of the Children of Morelia School. When he turned 90 El Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes honored him with a tribute, also the Fine Arts Museum of Asturias, Oviedo, Spain, paid tribute to a great teacher, conducting a large retrospective exhibition, gaining some important pieces of the artist to its collection and making a catalogue of his work. You can find Balmori Santos work at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, Museum of Arts and Sciences University (MUC), the Estampa Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Madrid, Spain and the Fine Arts Museum of Asturias, Oviedo, Spain among others.

Ricardo Martinez
Educated abroad, Ricardo Martinez returned to Mexico to study law. He is virtually self-taught as a painter, though he learned some techniques at the Galeria de Arte Mexicano. His early works were still lifes, and later he depicted monumental non-narrative figures reminiscent of Pre-Columbian sculpture. In the late '60's he achieved unreal atmospheres in his works by using plays of light and condensations of paint. In addition to easel paintings, he created stage designs for the ballet Xochipili by Carlos Chavez. The first exhibition of his work was held in Mexico City in 1942. His Repose was exhibited at the Venice Biennial of 1950, part of a group of Mexican works that ignored European debates regarding form and presented "proud, silent, fetish-like images." Martinez was honored in 1994 with a show at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.