Collection

Painter, graphic artist, and draftsman. Irizarry studied art at the Luchetti School of Art in Santurce, at the University of Puerto Rico under Carlos Marichal, and at the Campeche Studio and Gallery under Domingo García. In 1958 he received a scholarship from the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture to study at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (Academia de San Carlos) in Mexico City. His painting, of a very personal and expressive nature, was considered controversial in the early sixties because of its portrayals of profound, mysterious, and sometimes grotesque subject-matter. His portraits of alcoholics, street people, drug addicts, and the sick are rich in allegorical, religious, social, and political significance, and reveal an artist of great expressive strength and sensibility. His drawings possess a quality reminiscent, perhaps, of the post-war drawings of German artist Charles Grosz.