SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA.- The San Diego Museum of Art is proud to be the opening venue for this internationally touring exhibition of works by the important Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco. The first major exhibition in the United States of Orozco in more than forty years, it explores the extensive body of work Orozco produced during an extended stay in the United States from 1927 to 1934. The more than 120 paintings, prints, drawings, watercolors, and preparatory studies for murals in the exhibition showcase Orozco's revolutionary artistic vision.

The development of this exhibition has brought together an international team of scholars who have made a special study of twentieth-century Mexican art. The result is a comprehensive survey of Orozco's work of this period, never before assembled in a single exhibition. José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927-1934 examines the transformations in Orozco's subjects, style, and working methods, and the charged cultural climate in which he created such a diverse body of work.

The works in the exhibition will show the significant impact that living in the United States had on Orozco's art. This influence resulted, first and foremost, in the production of a new and extensive body of work that covered a broader range of subjects than the artist had treated before. Thus visitors will see alongside his paintings and drawings of the people and landscape of his native Mexico, representations of the modern American metropolis: its skyscrapers and bridges, its workers, and those who lost their jobs during the Great Depression. Also on view are Orozco's imaginative caricatures and "metaphysical" or surrealist-inspired works, which reveal the inventiveness and curiosity of the artist exploring new ideas.