Exhibition to highlight work of Francisco Toledo

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Francisco Toledo: Contemporary Graphic Art, an exhibition which highlights prints from the University at Buffalo's permanent collection, opens at UB Anderson Gallery with a public reception from 6-8 p.m. on, March 3.

UB Anderson Gallery, located on Martha Jackson Place near Englewood and Kenmore, is open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1-5 p.m.

The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, will be on view through May 28.

Francisco Toledo (1940- ), an artist born in Juchitan, Mexico, of Zapotec decent, studied at the Talle Libre de Grabado de la Escuela Diseno y Artesanías. In 1960, he moved to Paris, where he studied briefly at Stanley William Hayter's engraving workshop and met fellow Zapotec artist Rufino Tamayo, and Surrealist writers Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, all of whom deeply affected him. He is influenced by modern European masters, including Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Marc Chagall.

          Toledo's juxtaposition of symbols in his graphic imagery demonstrates his unique adaptations of personal experience, Mexican folklore, pre-Columbian objects, European modernism and myth in his work. The graphic works create a metamorphosed fantastical reality that explores the transcendental experience of ecstasy through eroticism, laughter, fear, violence, sacrifice and desire. These experiences exist amid the ambiguous relationship between reality and fantasy, the rational and irrational. Toledo's works are not bound within the confines of a geographical region or an ethnic origin, but communicate a universal symbolism, which imparts a universal sense of immediacy, unity, and sovereignty.

 The exhibition was curated by Sherry Corcoran, a graduate student from the UB Department of Art History. A color brochure with her essay accompanies the exhibition and is available free of charge.

The exhibition is part of The Latin Connection: Arts Across the Region, a series of exhibitions, educational programs, and events scheduled from January through May 2006 organized by the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University in conjunction with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Burchfield-Penney Art Center, CEPA Gallery, El Museum Francisco Oller y Diego Rivera, University at Buffalo Anderson Gallery and the Western New York Artists Group at Art Dialogue Gallery in Buffalo; the Kenan Center, Lockport, and the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts, St. Bonaventure University. The collaboration is sponsored by WNED, M&T Bank, NYSCA, Tops, and Binney & Smith.

UB Anderson Gallery is supported with funds from the Office of the Provost, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Anderson Gallery Program Fund and the UB Collection Care and Management Endowment Fund.