Horse Stung by Wasps (Caballo y avispas)

Francisco Benjamin Lopez Toledo

Francisco Toledo created a number of prints in 1969 and1970 featuring images of Mexican vaqueros or cowboys. The practice of herding cattle on horseback was brought to Mexico by the Spanish in the 16th and 17th centuries and spread from Mexico to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. The almost mystical connection between cowboys and their horses appealed to Toledo’s interest in hybrid creatures and connections between the natural and supernatural worlds.

This image is of a saddled, riderless horse at night,with the reins around the saddle horn, as it is being attacked by wasps. The horse's body is visually dissected by a tree on which the wasps' nest is attached to a branch.

Francisco Toledo had his first solo exhibition at the age of 19 years old in 1959 in Fort Worth, Texas. The following year he left for France to study and, while there, met Rufino Tamayo and Octavio Paz. He remained in Paris for five years and during that span of years he worked at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 workshop. He returned to Mexico in 1965 and then moved to New York briefly in the late 1970s. This image was printed in Paris by the lithography firm Atelier Clot, Bramsen & George (now Brunholt), France's oldest lithographic workshop, and published by Baltimore's Roten Galleries, which also published prints and portfolios as Aquarius Press.