Eduardo Terrazas

Eduardo Terrazas  (b. 1936, Guadalajara, Mexico) is a Mexican artist and architect who is celebrated for his substantial contributions to the fields of art, architecture, design, museology, and urban planning in his native country. Trained as an architect, Terrazas has over his five-decade career combined modernist geometric abstraction with Mexican folk techniques in works whose aesthetic has come to define contemporary Mexican art. Terrazas first gained international acclaim for his logo and promotional materials for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, which he co-designed with Lance Wyman. The motif, based on a Huichol textile, was heralded for foregrounding Mexican traditional folk design and infusing it with a modern graphic sensibility. In the 1970s, he began a series of investigations into geometric forms that would serve as a through line within his artistic career. These investigations, combined with the appropriation of techniques from Mexican folk art, have resulted in a unique language that navigates both contemporary art and craft traditions.

Terrazas has held positions as a lecturer in Architectural Design at Columbia University, New York from 1964 to 1965; the University of California, Berkeley from 1969 to 1970; and Cidoc, Cuernavaca in 1971. In 2013, he was invited to contribute his Tablas series, which employs a Huichol yarn-painting technique, to the Sharjah Biennial. The Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Mexico honored the artist with a retrospective exhibition in 2023 which spanned his practice from painting to urban-scale projects. The following year, his work was featured in Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th edition of The International Art Exhibition, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and organised by La Biennale di Venezia.