Francisco Corzas biography

Francisco Corzas Chávez was a Mexican painter and engraver among the main exponents of the Breaking Generation. He was born in Mexico City on October 4, 1936 to a very poor family. From 1951 to 1955 he attended the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving La Esmeralda in Mexico City. In 1957 Francisco Corzas went to Italy to study, accompanied by Humberto Kubli, a fellow student of La Esmeralda who shortly afterwards returned to Mexico. Corzas instead remains in Rome in the ancient neighborhood of Trastevere. In this period he studied the fresco technique at the Accademia San Giacomo and traveled around Europe visiting numerous museums to study classical European art. In 1958 Francisco Corzas met Bianca Dall'Occa Osti, whom he married in 1959 in Mexico City.
In the 1960s he returned to Mexico where he became part of the Breaking Generation which included artists such as Lilia Carrillo, Vicente Rojo, Fernando Garcia Ponce, Manuel Felguerez, Jose Luis Cuevas, Rafael Coronel and Alberto Gironella.
In 1965 he won first prize at the Salon 65, at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, in Mexico City. Also in Mexico City, in 1972 he presented a large retrospective with works created from 1962 to 1972, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
In 1973 he returned to Europe again and created two oil paintings for the Vatican. The same year in Milan he created the series Umbrío por la pena in Giorgio Upiglio's printing house. In 1974 he lived in Paris, where he made several lithographs in the Ramsen printing house. In 1976, upon returning to Mexico, he received a scholarship from the Fundacion Cultural Televisa to create the various works that make up Agonías y otras ofrendas, which he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art of Mexico City.
One of Francisco Corzas' favorite themes was the female nude, whose archetypes are linked to the turn-of-the-century conception of the femme fatale or the man-eating woman capable of possess the soul of the artist.
Francisco Corzas died in Mexico City on September 15, 1983.