Carlos Mérida (December 2, 1891 – December 21, 1985) was a Guatemalan artist who was one of the first to fuse European modern painting to Latin American themes, especially those related to Guatemala and Mexico.
Carlos Mérida was born Carlos Santiago Ortega in Guatemala City to Serapio Santiago Mérida and Guadalupe Ortega Barnoya.
From 1907 to 1909, the family went to live in the small town of Almolonga in the Quetzaltenango Department of Guatemala, where they were from. Here he continued music and art lessons.
After he completed middle school and the family returned to Guatemala City, he entered a trade school called the Instituto de Artes y Oficios, then the Instituto de Ciência y Letras.
At age nineteen, he approached Catalan artist and writer Jaime Sabartés, who helped Mérida organize his first individual exhibition at the offices of the El Economista newspaper in Guatemala City in 1910.
His second exhibition in Guatemala was at the Rosenthal Building in 1915, an exhibition which marks the beginning of modern painting in Guatemala. His time with Mexican artists in Europe prompted him to go to Mexico in 1919, when the fighting from the Mexican Revolution had ended but there was still disorder. He arrived to the country a year before Diego Rivera returned from Europe.
In 1919, he married Dalila Gálvez, with whom he had two daughters, Alma and Ana. He died in Mexico City at the age of 94 on December 21, 1985.
His first exhibition in Mexico was in 1920 at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. In that same year, he exhibited in the United States at the Hispanic Society of New York. He participated in a collective show called the Independent Artists Exhibition in New York in 1922 and exhibited individually at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in Guatemala and the Valentin Dudesing Gallery in New York in 1926.
Mérida made several trips to Europe over his lifetime to both study art and work as an artist and diplomat. His early trips in the 1920s and 1930s put him in touch with both avant garde movements in Europe as well as noted Latin American artists, especially those from Mexico. His last trip was in 1950s.
Mérida has forty-five exhibitions in the United States and eighteen in Mexico from 1928 to 1948. These included an exhibition with Rufino Tamayo at the Art Center of New York (1930), the John Becker and Valentine galleries in New York (1930), the Club de Escritores de México and the Galería Posada in Mexico City (1931), the Stedhal Gallery and the Stanley Rose Gallery in Los Angeles, the East West Gallery in San Francisco, the Palacio de Bellas Artes and the Georgette Passedoit and Cuchnitz galleries in New York (1939-1940) as well as the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1940 in Mexico City. Other venues for his exhibitions included Harvard University, the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California in Berkeley, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1954 he exhibited at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas.
Mérida’s work can be found in major public and private collections around the world.
He had three major epochs, a figurative period from 1907 to 1926, a surrealism phase from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s and from 1950 until his death, geometric forms characterized his work.
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