Mathias Goeritz


Werner Mathias Goeritz Brunner was a Mexican painter and sculptor of German origin. After spending much of the 1940s in North Africa and Spain, he and his wife, photographer Marianne Gast, immigrated to Mexico in 1949.

Early life and education

Mathias Goeritz was born in Danzig, German Empire in 1915 and spent his childhood in Berlin. He began studying philosophy and the history of art at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, now known as the Humboldt University of Berlin, in 1934. He received a doctorate in art history from this institution in 1940. His doctoral dissertation on the nineteenth-century German painter Ferdinand von Rayski was published as Ferdinand Von Rayski und die Kunst des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. During the course of his studies, Goeritz also trained as an artist at the Kunstgewerbe- und Handwerkerschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where he studied drawing with German artists Max Kaus and Hans Orlowski.

Career

Upon completion of his doctorate, Goeritz worked at Berlin's Nationalgalerie, now the Alte Nationalgalerie, under the supervision of nineteenth-century art specialist Paul Ortwin Rave.
In early 1941, in the midst of the Second World War, Goeritz left Germany, settling first in Tetuan, Morocco. In 1942 he married photographer Marianne Gast, and the couple settled in Granada, Spain, just after the war ended in 1945.
In June 1946, he had his first solo exhibition at the Librería-Galería Clan in Madrid under the pseudonym "Ma-Gó". in 1947 the Goeritzs relocated to Madrid. There, Goeritz developed a close friendship with Spanish sculptor Ángel Ferrant.
In the summer of 1948, Goeritz and Ferrant traveled to visit the prehistoric paintings of the Cave of Altamira in the north of Spain, along with writer Ricardo Gullón and others. At that time Goeritz proposed the founding of an Escuela de Altamira, an association of artists and writers who would meet annually near the Cave, in 1948. The Escuela de Altamira would ultimately hold two meetings, in 1949 and 1950.
In 1949, through the intervention of Mexican architect Ignacio Díaz Morales, Goeritz was offered a job teaching art history to the students of the newly founded the school of architecture in Guadalajara, Mexico. In 1953, he first presented his "Manifiesto de la Arquitectura Emocional" at the pre-inauguration of the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, which he designed in 1952–53. During the 1950s, Goeritz also collaborated with Luis Barragán to make monumental abstract sculptures in reinforced concrete, including El animal del Pedregal and the Torres de la Ciudad Satélite.
In 1989, he became an honorary member of the Mexican Academia de Artes.

Personal life and death

In 1942, he married photographer Marianne Gast. He died on August 4, 1990, in Mexico City.

Works and legacy

Goeritz exhibited widely in Mexico and beyond throughout his life, and had a significant influence on younger Mexican artists such as Helen Escobedo and Pedro Friedeberg. El animal del Pedregal, sculpture in reinforced concrete, Jardines de Pedregal de San Ángel, Mexico City.Los amantes, sculpture at the Hotel Presidente, Acapulco.El bailarín.La mano divina and La mano codiciosa, reliefs in the Iglesia de San Lorenzo, Mexico City.