Eduardo Terrazas

A founding member of the contemporary art scene in Mexico, Eduardo Terrazas (b. 1936, Guadalajara) has built a career that spans architecture, design, museology, urban planning and visual arts. As a young architect, Terrazas came to prominence as the co-designer of the logo and prevalent design elements for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. The logo, traced in concentric circles and inspired by Huichol artisan techniques from Jalisco, Durango, and Nayarit, set a precedent for the geometric forms that have come to define the artist’s visual language.

In the early 1970s, Terrazas worked closely with Santos Motoaapohua de la Torre de Santiago, a Huichol craftsman, and began to incorporate the folk art technique of embedding brightly coloured wool into Campeche beeswax poured over wooden panels to produce solid blocks of colour. The Cosmos series, a body of work exploring Terrazas’ interest in mathematics and harmony on a universal scale, uses this Huichol technique to explore the possibility of endless variation within a cosmos guided by strict mathematical principles. He produces unique compositions within the same matrix, his own symbolic map of the universe. Terrazas finds a human-scale relief to these cosmic queries in the handmade and fuzzily-textured wool panels, embracing the inevitable discrepancies in restricting fluid and natural materials to a grid formation. The artist’s strict geometry is softened at the corners by the continuous winding thread, which constitutes its own second layer of patterning, demanding concentrated and meditative study.

Stylistically close with the geometric abstraction that is fundamental to modernism across the Americas, Terrazas’s appropriation of elements from Mexican folk art and embrace of a craft aesthetic has contributed to his unique visual language, and puts forward a Latin American textile tradition beyond ethnographic readings and as a ground for exploring more universal concerns.

The Cosmos series is examined in great depth in the 2022 publication 'Cosmos,' including contributions by Hans Ulrich Obrist and mathematician Marcus du Sautoy.