Guadalupe Sobarzo expressed her rebellion in her art and in her life

Always firm and consistent with her aesthetic and political rebellion, the Sonoran artist Guadalupe Sobarzo, co-founder and member of the group Suma, passed away in Comala, Colima, on the eve of her 70th birthday, which she would have celebrated on October 6.

The death occurred on September 14 due to a respiratory condition, although the news was only made public on Tuesday, the day his ashes were presented at the Temple of San Miguel, in Comala.

The composer and visual artist Vicente Rojo Cama and the researcher and curator Adriana Sandoval, friends of the creator, highlighted her for her very personal way of bringing rebellion to art and her life, as an exercise that he was building in his day to day without any major pretension.

Born in Hermosillo in 1954, Guadalupe Sobarzo moved to Mexico City in 1972 and trained at the Academia de San Carlos, in the workshops of Gilberto Aceves Navarro and in the private classes of Felipe Ehrenberg.

In 1976 she was one of the founders of the Suma group alongside the painter Ricardo Rocha (1937-2008) –whose partner she was until his death– and other artists such as Gabriel Macotela and René Freire.

This collective, active until 1982, was born in what is now the Faculty of Arts and Design of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in the muralism workshop taught by Ricardo Rocha, as a questioning of the validity of the concepts of Mexican muralists, especially those referring to public art.

“When Suma disintegrated, she was the architect, along with Mario Rangel –another of its members– of donating the group’s entire archive to the Institute of Graphic Arts of Oaxaca (IAGO), an institution founded by the painter Francisco Toledo. Guadalupe and Mario were very clear that Suma was a precursor and a reference for Mexican art today,” said Rojo Cama.

Lupe was very visionary. She knew that we had to preserve this work for the future of Mexican art, as this was the first time that Mexican artists took to the streets of the city and worked with themes that are still essential, such as migrants, bureaucrats, workers, those groups in society that are still very forgotten.

According to Adriana Sandoval, Guadalupe Sobarzo had the ability as part of Suma to go side by side, in intelligent communication, with Ricardo Rocha, who It was the great love of her life, but also an incentive for her, recently arrived from Sonora, and in a context of repression, such as the 70s, to have the courage to go out into the streets, denounce things that were happening at that time and take on that part of art with a very concrete social commitment..

She was an artist She managed to figure out how to be a woman at a time when the art world was very complex for them; she observed and predicted what the challenges were that women, and all creators in general, faced; she always had sound, precise and very brave advice.he added.

In addition to fighting until the last moment to preserve Ricardo Rocha’s legacy and ensure that it was safeguarded in a public university, Guadalupe Sobarzo distinguished herself creatively by addressing feminine themes in the sense of everyday life, through embroidery and the representation of insects, flowers and fruits.