Francisco Corzas biography

Francisco Corzas Chávez was a Mexican painter and engraver, one of the main exponents of the Rupture 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 from La Esmeralda who returned to Mexico shortly after. Corzas, however, stayed in Rome in the ancient Trastevere district. During this period, he studied fresco technique at the San Giacomo Academy and traveled throughout 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 Breakaway 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 the first prize at 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 once again and created two oil paintings for the Vatican. The same year in Milan, he produced the series Umbrío por la pena at Giorgio Upiglio's print shop. In 1974, he lived in Paris, where he created several lithographs at the Ramsen print shop. In 1976, back in 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 Museo di Arte Moderna in Mexico City.
One of Francisco Corzas's favorite themes was the female nude, whose archetypes are linked to the fin de siècle conception of the femme fatale, or the man-eating woman capable of possessing the artist's soul.
Francisco Corzas dies in Mexico City on September 15, 1983.