Eduardo Terrazas

Eduardo Terrazas (b. 1936, Guadalajara, Mexico) is a founding figure of the Mexican contemporary art scene. Over the past fifty years, he has dedicated his career to architecture, design, museology, urban planning and the visual arts. Terrazas’s professional trajectory began at a young age when he was selected as a co-designer of the logo and key visual elements for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. The logo, composed of concentric circles, draws inspiration from the artistic techniques of Huichol artisans from the Jalisco, Durango and Nayarit regions. Their geometric forms provided a foundational template for the visual language that would come to define Terrazas’s work. In the 1970s, he began exploring the formal relationships between geometric elements through drawing.

The combination of these investigations with the appropriation of elements from Mexican folk art has resulted in a distinct visual language that navigates both contemporary art and craft traditions. For Terrazas, the application of craft is an essential ontological process, one he considers especially relevant in the 21st century. He adopted the Huichol yarn technique—where coloured yarn is pressed onto wax-covered boards—for two principal reasons: its compelling aesthetic qualities and its inherently labour-intensive nature, which requires deep focus and therefore fosters a meditative engagement with the artistic process.