Girl’s portrait, Horacio Renteria Rocha Rocha Durango (1912 -1972)

Girl’s portrait

61,5 x 45,5 cm / 24,2 x 17.9 in

Signed lower right: Horacio

Provenance:
Private collection, Paris

Even as a child, Horacio painted on house facades, using brick dust, lime and pieces of burnt coal in Victoria de Durango, Mexico. He managed to successfully complete his studies in mathematics and soon began working as a French and Spanish teacher. During his teaching years, he began to take up and deepen the artistic work he had tried as a child. Thus he was a student of the painter William des Lourdes and produced magnificent wall paintings. After the passing of his wife, he turned his back on teaching and turned fully to painting. In 1940 he obtained a scholarship at the San Carlos Academy of Art, then went to Mexico City. This was followed by stays in Guerrero and in beautiful San Luis Potosi. Here we offer a main motif of Horacio's work, because children at play or in their domestic environment, sometimes with cult and household objects, were his most sought-after subjects, through which a native soul was transferred to canvas. But his works were soon famous abroad as well, with Mia Farrow, for example, poring over a reproduction by Horacio Renteria Rocha in Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby." His paintings were also particularly popular in the Paris art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, and were sometimes even exhibited in the Louvre and the Prado.