Contenido
Entre sus obras destaca el Museo El Eco. Este museo albergaba obras importantes, como La serpiente —una escultura de Goeritz que actualmente se encuentra en el Museo de Arte Moderno de la Ciudad de México—.
El Eco es una de las obras más significativas del artista y es crucial en la historia del arte moderno mexicano. El edificio fue inaugurado en 1953 a petición del empresario mexicano Daniel Mont y es considera una de las piedras angulares del arte moderno en México. La escultura habitable que Goeritz y Daniel Mont erigieron fue destinada para que otros experimentaran bajo sus paredes irregulares. Funcionó como galería, restaurante-bar, espacio de experimentación teatral, sede activista y, hoy en día, museo universitario.
En el Museo del Juguete Antiguo México se exhiben algunas piezas de Mathias Goeritz que dan testimonio de su faceta de experimentación en la escultura. Las piezas en exhibición están hechas de materiales como madera y metal y sus medidas van desde los 40 cm, hasta 1,70 m de alto.
Parte de su archivo personal —obra y documentos— se resguarda en el Instituto Cultural Cabañas, el cual se ha expuesto en el Museo Cabañas.[2].
The emotional architecture
The year after the opening of El Eco, the Manifesto of Emotional Architecture was published. Goeritz was a precursor of this trend, which is characterized by the use of a clean design and the construction of towers, in which the sculptural sense takes precedence over the functional one. Emotional architecture could be understood as a permanent question about the way we establish the places where we live and what the intrinsic functions of the human being are. Mathias Goeritz argued that architecture should be a work of art, inviting us, through it, to dwell in spaces to be able to appreciate and feel different emotions when being in new environments.
Factors such as color, lighting and the use of water establish special characteristics in the environments, which sharpen certain senses in human beings. Each of these elements has details that, when appreciated together, create different spaces, which allow us to appreciate each place in a unique way. It is not surprising that Goeritz wanted to relate his experiment with the classical architecture of cathedrals and mosques, buildings open to the metaphysical, in favor of the emancipation of human experience in search of the expansion of the meanings of life; places where the main activity is always to come, while they are transit spaces for those who inhabit them.[3].
Other works
In Mexico he entered into controversy with the country's artistic establishment. In an open letter, the painters Rivera and Siqueiros describe him as: "an impostor without the most insignificant talent or preparation to be an artist." Despite this, in 1957 he was elected director of visual design at the National School of Architecture. In that same year, the great architect Luis Barragán commissioned him to design the entrance to Ciudad Satélite, for which he made five concrete pylons with a triangular section with heights between 36 and 58 meters; work made in collaboration with Luis Barragán himself and the painter Jesús Reyes Ferreira (after a trip with Justino Fernández to San Gimignano, Italy); inaugurated in March 1958 as one of the symbols of the most relevant national modernization project. Parallel to this work, he made the Temixco Towers, in the State of Morelos, and the stained glass windows of the church of San Lorenzo "Iglesia de San Lorenzo (Mexico City)"), in Mexico City, renewing on the scene what until then was recognized as sacred art.
In 1959, after the death of his wife - Marianne Gast -, Mathias Goeritz began the series of two-dimensional works known as Golden Messages, monochromatic works that include gold leaf as a material that represents spirituality. Goeritz defines this work as a plastic prayer. This series culminates with the exhibition of the same name at the Carstairs Gallery in New York in 1962. The Golden Messages were Luis Barragán's precursors in the project for the altar of the Capuchinas Chapel in Mexico City in 1963. In that same year he collaborated with the architect Ricardo Legorreta on the Automex Towers.
In 1964 he made the sculpture of the Star of David, the towers and the stained glass windows of the Maguen David synagogue, and in 1967 the Latticework of the Camino Real Hotel and another for the Smith Kline laboratories that are today occupied by the DF Human Rights Commission, and the stained glass windows for the main nave of the Metropolitan Cathedral, all of these works in Mexico City.
A year later, on the occasion of the 1968 Olympic Games, Goeritz promoted the creation of the Friendship Route, an urban sculpture circuit, in the Peripheral Ring "Peripheral Ring (Valley of Mexico)") of Mexico City on the occasion of the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games, a kind of open-air sculpture museum that, along 17 kilometers, shows the work of 16 international artists). For this project he built The Big Dipper (a set of concrete columns-towers in front of the Palacio de los Deportes. In 1975 he founded the Cadigoguse group with Geles Cabrera, J. L. Díaz, Sebastián and Ángela Gurría, with whom he created five sculptural plazas in Villahermosa.
From 1978 to 1980 he created the center of the Sculpture Space #Sculptural_Space "Centro Cultural Universitario (UNAM)") in collaboration with the artists Helen Escobedo, Manuel Felguérez, Hersúa, Sebastián and Federico Silva "Federico Silva (sculptor)"), within one of the grounds of Ciudad Universitaria, with the intention of integrating art and nature. This work would also continue in Mexico City, the Embedded prisms (Chapultepec park) and Bambi's Crown (1979, university cultural center), in which he also achieves optical illusions. Probably also a group of polyhedra at the access to the Fuentes Brotantes Park in Tlalpan south of Mexico City.
In this period (in 1980), he also made the Jerusalem Labyrinth, at the Alejandro and Lily Saltiel Community Center in Jerusalem, in Israel; perhaps his "most complex and interesting" work, as the artist himself describes it: a building lacking windows, of great strength and whose light is introduced through large terraces.
On February 8, 1982, he inaugurated his sculpture Las Torres at the Aragón Faculty of Higher Studies (UNAM), while in 1988 he built the tower of the Miguel Alemán Foundation in Mexico City. In 1990 his work Monograma AMT was completed in Jerusalem, after his death on August 4 of the same year.
If in painting he is influenced by German expressionism, in sculpture and architecture he develops a style marked by purity of design and spatial plastic integration as a means of raising the spiritual level of society.