Artist Information

1. Leonor Anaya is an artist who mainly expresses herself in ceramics, although she does some printmaking, which she began when she was an art student. She works clay slabs and her challenges tend to be with glazes. In her work, she investigates spaces, from the extreme thinness of delicate cataphylls (the name given to each one of the skin-like layers of certain vegetables, such as onions) to the massiveness of walls. She also displays an affinity with plants, the sea and with the torturous labyrinths of women's suffering.

2. Alfonso Ávila worked alongside world-renowned Gustavo Pérez for 14 years. Now working independently, Ávila works with the wheel, glazes, and slips. When it comes to forms, he makes giddy expansions, in vertical format, with cuts and inversions, inventing structures within forms made on the wheel.

3. Having studied in Toluca, Joel Bautista Rojo dwells at the pole of love for ceramics and nature, bringing both into play in works made on the wheel as well as with slabs, working at high temperatures, with a special predilection for blue whales that emerge from small diptychs. In counterpart to a volume emerging from the plane, marine animals are painted on utilitarian pieces. The point of encounter between the utilitarian and the ornamental is where he finds his greatest freedom of expression. Bautista Rojo's rounded, oblong and concave forms serve as strainers, pitchers and other unique accessories.

4. Along with husband Joel Bautista Rojo, Margarita Cházaro heads the Mandinga workshop. She is the only one who is currently working with porcelain in the State of Veracruz. Since her days as a student with teachers in the Japanese School of Ceramics and Porcelain of Toluca in the State of Mexico, she found the way to resist the vigor of the school, devoting herself to the study of glazes. In her installation "Women in the Desert," in which she approaches figurative compositions more than ever before, entering both the field of narrative as well as social critique-focusing on a present reality that is unfolding in Ciudad Juarez, a zone where the brutal murder of women continues. Cházaro departs from formal concerns to express concerns regarding gender in an autobiographical and social sense. As for oxides, slips, glazes, and colors, she does not work with strong, contrasting tones, but rather with earthy, sand tones which the relation in tonal scale from white to intense grays used in the crackled surfaces is maintained.

5. and 6. Constantino Méndez & Artemio Mendoza are current assistants to Gustavo Pérez. They are both in their creative development stages of their careers, however, providing exceptional work at the wheel and as assistants.

7. Elsa Naveda has solid training and is interested in investigating firing techniques. Her work resorts to circular and conical forms to express itself, while arising from considerable wheel production including other media such as slabs and appliqué for larger pieces. Semi-figural compositions predominate, although there are those who see her work as abstract. Between clay and the wheel, sculptural and utilitarian form, Naveda has produced an important range of works almost always related to what is organic.

8. Gustavo Pérez has built his own reputation as an international artist with incessant effort and dedication, on par with the sacrifice entailed by utter dedication and without any concessions in a rigorous calendar of profound isolation and reflection. Pérez works slabs, appliqué and repoussé. His stoneware has resulted in beautiful, stylized forms of elongated, twisted vessels. His pieces have formed part of exhibitions in Mexico, the United States and Europe.

9. Martha Ovalle began to make ceramics almost two decades ago. Her interest in the material is almost parallel to the multiple stimuli that are attracted to her in life, all sheltered in her sensitivity. In Ovalle's work, there is a modernity fed by intensely subtle relations underlying those native inhabitants and with the natural world. She is stimulated more by her experience than by rigor and perseverance.

10. Tomás Owen is one of the original assistants at El Tomate—a Xalapan workshop opened in the mid-80's by the late Georges Vinaver and Gustavo Pérez. Other assistants included Rocío Sagaón, Else Naveda, and Teresa Gómez. In his early years, earth colors and browns predominated in his work. In the last ten years, a romantic palette dominated by cobalt blue has made his vessels more modern as well as closer to a tonal aesthetic from yore, and with smaller, attractive, contemporary pieces, decorated with the results of firing with kindling. Tomás' relationship with his beautiful natural surroundings and with the spectacle of seeing the flames of sputtering wood at each firing are unquestionable the source of the pleasurable expressions increasingly evident in the body of his ceramic creations.

11. Maite Rodríguez has a special disposition for small formats, in comedic, tragic and utilitarian spheres. Her small workshop and mini-kiln allow her independence from daily life, allowing her to delve into making and experimenting with traditional formats-vessels and fountains-populating with beings peeking out, climbing up or clustering into groups. She does not devote herself to ceramics from a telluric perspective. In her pieces, what comes together is an interest for modernity expressed in the stylization of figures, and in the finishes. Rodríguez and Marta Ovalle are inseparable ceramists. Both agree they do not make sculpture as a means of making a living and both came out of the Mandinga Workshop.

12. Originally trained as an architect, Viviana Romo's work displays two trends: utilitarian and relief. Also beginning as an assistant to maestro Gustavo Pérez, her work is a reflection of Scandinavian design from the 1960's and 1970's.

13. Rocío Sagaón, interacting in the circuit of dance and the cultural milieu of Mexico since a young age, expressed her restlessness in all fields of the visual arts, and later together with her husband Georges Vinaver, entered the realm of ceramics. Her pieces invoke the Pre-Columbian and Oriental tradition. Sagaón works on diverse scales, from tiny pieces to large scale.

14. Valentina Sandoval's work is customarily of baroque quality and inhabited by a truculent aesthetic. Her art forms a dreadful, fantastic expression, revealing facets of "magical realism" always alive in Latin America. Her utilitarian and miniature pieces express different, dispossessed, and even well resolved results.

15. The late George Vinaver deserves posthumous recognition due to his contributions to the relief genre of ceramics. Vinaver, wife Sagaón, and Gustavo Pérez are all founders of the El Tomate workshop opened in 1984 on a large piece of land owned by Vinaver and wife. Early pieces produced at El Tomate for part of Seven Worlds.