No preocuparse [Don't Worry]

Pedro Friedeberg, a Mexican artist of Italian and German-Jewish descent who has lived and worked in Mexico City for most of his life, is most recognized for his surrealist sculpture and printmaking. Over the course of his long career, Friedeberg cultivated a contentious public persona that critics described as eccentric. He has frequently made racist, classist, and sexist public statements, including disparaging comments about the cultures of ancient and contemporary Indigenous Mexican peoples. Ironically, the appearance of No preocuparse is strongly reminiscent of a “tree of life,” a type of Central Mexican ceramic folk sculpture with roots in the pre-contact period. Like other examples of this genre, No preocuparse is an arrangement of motifs that represent complimentary cosmological opposites: the light and the dark, the drab and the colorful, the mobile and the still, or the mundane and the supernatural.