Skeletons and Madonnas Lead Mexico’s Graphic Arts Revolution

We can see the gears of visual understanding turn in the piercing contrast between the chiaroscuros of Caravaggio and the soft shadows of Vermeer and Zorn. We can transcend realism to distill the iconography of everyday life with van Gogh and the stylized portraiture of Kahlo. We even feel its presence in the comparatively opaque statements of mode

So much of what we see in galleries is responding to the imperative to overproduce, overenlarge, overconsume, and for artists with ascending and funded careers this trajectory can seem all but unavoidable. As Roberta Smith points out, the primary meaning of these works is often: “I made this because I can.”