Francisco Toledo valuation
Zapotec artist of animals, myth and Oaxaca, who spent his life defending the place he came from.
Francisco Toledo was born in 1940 to Zapotec parents from Juchitan in Oaxaca, studied briefly in Mexico City and then spent years in Paris, where Tamayo encouraged him.
What a work by Francisco Toledo is worth
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Bio
Francisco Toledo was born in 1940 to Zapotec parents from Juchitan in Oaxaca, studied briefly in Mexico City and then spent years in Paris, where Tamayo encouraged him. The work is populated by animals — iguanas, crickets, rabbits, frogs, monkeys — drawn from Zapotec myth and folk story and rendered in gritty, earth-toned mixed media that frequently incorporates sand, insects and organic matter. He returned to Oaxaca and became its most determined public defender, funding libraries, a graphic arts institute and a photography centre, and campaigning against development and against genetically modified maize. He died in 2019.
The leading Mexican artist of his generation after Tamayo, with prices set in Mexico City and New York. Works on paper — gouache, watercolour, mixed media, frequently on handmade or amate paper — are the bulk of the market and are physically delicate, with organic inclusions that can degrade and papers that are light-sensitive. Toledo was also a very serious printmaker in etching and aquatint, and produced ceramics, textiles and kites. He is significantly forged, and provenance to a documented gallery is important.
Fort Worth, Paris and the institutions he founded
Toledo studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Oaxaca and at the Centro Superior de Artes Aplicadas in Mexico City, where he learned printmaking. At nineteen a solo exhibition in Fort Worth, Texas, drew international attention, and he lived in Paris from 1960 to 1965. He showed at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and in 2000 more than 90 works went to the Whitechapel in London and the Reina Sofía in Madrid.
In Oaxaca he helped found the Instituto de Artes Gráficas, with its library, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, and he received the Right Livelihood Award in 2005. In 2017 the Fondo Cultural Banamex published a four-volume catalogue of his work after five years of research. His children include the poet Natalia Toledo and the artists Laureana Toledo and Dr Lakra.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
