Federico Castellon

A protégé of Diego Rivera, two-time Guggenheim Fellow Federico Castellón is best known for his surrealist paintings, prints, and etchings. At Rivera’s urging, Castellón was given his first solo gallery show in New York in the early 1930s, at the age of 18. Though he grew up in Brooklyn, he returned to his native Spain in his early 20s to study painting. It was on that trip, during which he felt like he was engulfed in a constant dream state, that he developed his unique surrealist style that blended reality, memory, and fantasy. He is widely considered one of America’s first surrealist artists, his seminal series predating the Museum of Modern Art’s watershed 1936 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.”