Francisco Zúñiga: Grupo de cuatro mujeres de pie

Although Francisco Zúñiga had worked in sculpture since childhood, assisting his father, a maker of religious figures in Costa Rica, he committed himself to the medium with new intensity after relocating to Mexico in 1936. During the 1930s, painting in Mexico was largely dominated by a small circle of artists, especially the muralists, who effectively controlled its public possibilities. Sculpture, by contrast, remained comparatively underdeveloped and less celebrated. Zúñiga recognized in this situation an opening for experimentation and distinction, and he built an expansive sculptural practice centered on the human figure.

Soon after his arrival in Mexico City, Zúñiga enrolled at the National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking, widely known as La Esmeralda. There he encountered the work of Constantin Brancusi, Aristide Maillol, and Henry Moore, all of whom shaped his understanding of modern sculptural form. He worked in the atelier of Guillermo Ruiz, a major site for direct carving between 1927 and 1937, and assisted in producing public monuments. Through this environment he acquired technical fluency, including training in bronze casting by the lost wax method. Over the following decades, his practice ranged across direct carving in wood, modeling in clay, carving in hard stone and volcanic granite, and bronze casting. Appointed a professor at La Esmeralda in 1938, he later established an independent workshop in 1943. From this studio he trained a generation of artists who would become leading figures in mid-century Mexican art, among them Pedro Coronel, Rosa Castillo, and Manuel Felguérez. Between 1950 and 1960 he also participated in the Plastic Integration Group, collaborating with architects and artists such as Juan O’Gorman and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Whether producing public monuments or integrated architectural projects, Zúñiga developed a conception of sculptural space that avoided the overt political narratives favored by many of his contemporaries, while still embracing the civic and open-air setting of street sculpture.

Parallel to this broad technical engagement was an early and sustained fascination with the Indigenous and pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas. Just before leaving Costa Rica, Zúñiga produced a series of forty-four watercolors, along with one India ink drawing, at the request of archaeologist Jorge A. Lines. These works document pre-Columbian ceramics discovered in the Zapandi tomb at Filadelfia, Guanacaste. After settling in Mexico, he meticulously drew objects in the Museum of Anthropology, then located on Moneda Street, and he continued to study pre-Hispanic art throughout his career. He was also employed by architects to reproduce pre-Columbian and colonial sculptures for building projects. Although he did not count this commissioned work as part of his official oeuvre, it served as a continuous source of visual and conceptual material that he transformed within his own artistic language.

Created in 1974, Grupo de cuatro mujeres de pie marks the culmination of Zúñiga’s long exploration of standing groups of cloaked women with emphatically modeled hips and abdomens. The sculpture presents four monumental female figures that evoke distinct ages and stages of life, moving from adolescence to pregnancy, middle age, and old age. While Zúñiga had developed related studies, sketches, and individual works as early as 1965, these figures were conceived to function together as a unified ensemble. They are powerful peasant types that operate as archetypes rather than portraits, though they remain grounded in observation. Zúñiga regularly worked from models as he refined his many representations of Indigenous women. He described one model, Evelia from Veracruz, as a “universal native type,” even though surviving photographs suggest a more mestiza appearance. Additional photographs taken during his travels in Pátzcuaro and the Yucatán in 1970 show how closely his work drew on lived encounters, even as his titles often offered only general identifiers such as Yucatecas, Yalaltecas, Chamulas, or Juchitecas, and at times no ethnic marker at all. In Grupo de cuatro mujeres de pie, these women become forceful, contemporary counterparts to Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, projecting Zúñiga’s conception of a universal femininity shaped through the lens of native-ness. The ambitious scale, the careful proportional relationships among the figures, and the complexity of the grouping make this work one of the artist’s most intricate sculptural achievements. Its significance is underscored by its placement on the cover of the first volume of Zúñiga’s catalogue raisonné devoted to his sculpture.

The creation of Grupo de cuatro mujeres de pie coincided with a period of heightened international recognition. After a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1969, Zúñiga presented individual exhibitions in the early 1970s at institutions including the San Diego Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Phoenix Art Museum. In 1974 he also began systematically numbering his bronze editions. Increased success abroad allowed him to reduce dependence on state commissions and to work more consistently in bronze. For Zúñiga, bronze was not merely a material of prestige, but a medium that connected his work to antiquity. The geometric swelling of the women’s bodies recalls the volumetric intensity of the pre-Columbian vessels he had drawn and painted in his youth. Zúñiga repeatedly emphasized that sculpture is an ancient language and that it should carry cultural meaning. He located the authority of his female figures in their pre-Hispanic resonance, arguing that despite the violence of colonization, Indigenous cultural strength endured and remained visible through sculpture. This persistence, he suggested, explains the self-contained solidity of his figures and their quiet, resistant will.