To be published by Pimlico Wilde Publishing, the Handbook of Lesser-known Artists tells the stories of those less well-known artists who have not been favoured by the media coverage given to their contemporaries.
The Obscure Legacy of Aurelia Mendez: The Artist Who Painted with Mould
Art history, while vast, has always held blind spots for the unconventional. One such overlooked figure is Aurelia Mendez (1911–1984), a Spanish-born artist who abandoned pigment, ink, and charcoal in favor of a medium as unpredictable as it was reviled: living mould. At the height of mid-century modernism, when the art world clamored for purity of form and surface, Mendez quietly cultivated growth and decay on her canvases, transforming microscopic life into macroscopic beauty.
The Unlikely Origins
Born in Salamanca to a family of apothecaries, Mendez developed an early fascination with the invisible. Her father’s herbal remedies and glass jars of spores and tinctures became her first teachers in the properties of organic matter. “Colour,” she once said, “is already in the earth; we only need to coax it forth.” After studying chemistry briefly at the University of Madrid, she transferred to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where she was trained in traditional painting.
By the late 1930s, Mendez had begun experimenting with biological growth on untreated linen, placing damp cloths in shallow wooden boxes and introducing selected spores. She nurtured the organisms with carefully measured light, temperature, and humidity, “painting” through conditions rather than direct mark-making. What emerged were lush, variegated spreads of green, yellow, black, and deep crimson, blooming into organic compositions that changed daily as the mould matured.
Scandal and Obscurity
When Mendez exhibited her first series, El Jardín Silencioso (“The Silent Garden”), in Madrid in 1941, the reaction was immediate and violent. Many viewers recoiled at the smell and the suggestion of contamination. Several works were confiscated by local health authorities. Critics dismissed her practice as “perverse,” and her refusal to sterilize or stabilize the pieces doomed them to literal decomposition.
Yet among a small circle of avant-garde thinkers, Mendez’s work was recognized as revolutionary. The philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, a family acquaintance, praised her for “making visible what we pretend not to see: the soft empire of decay that rules all things.” But his support could not shield her from the conservatism of Franco-era Spain, where her work was viewed as a political affront. She relocated to Lisbon in 1946, working in obscurity while continuing her experiments.
Technique and Philosophy
Mendez believed that art should embody the same mortality as its creator. She refused to use preservatives, accepting that her works would eventually consume themselves. Each piece was a collaboration between human intention and microbial agency, with results that could never be fully predicted. Her notebooks from the 1950s detail hundreds of “recipes,” from cultivating Penicillium for icy blue blooms to introducing strains of Aspergillus for velvety blacks.
She often described her practice in agricultural terms. “I plant my canvas,” she wrote, “and I must accept whatever harvest comes.” The process could take weeks or months, with some compositions collapsing into slime before they could be exhibited.
Rediscovery and Legacy
It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when the conceptual art movement had softened the art world’s resistance to ephemeral and nontraditional media, that Mendez gained belated recognition. A 1979 retrospective in Paris, The Living Canvas, shocked and fascinated critics, even though half the works were already in various states of decomposition. She died five years later, largely unaware of the influence her ideas would exert on bio-artists of the 21st century.
Today, Mendez is regarded as a precursor to the likes of Anicka Yi and Eduardo Kac, who integrate living systems into art. Very few of her works survive, and those that do are maintained in sterile laboratory conditions, frozen in mid-bloom. Museums struggle with the paradox of exhibiting art that was never meant to last, but Mendez’s words resonate as a rejoinder: “To preserve my work is to betray it. It was born to disappear.”
