Ring with Green Onyx Mask and Futuristic Headdress

A sculptural mask head set with green onyx and crowned by an abstract, geometric headdress, this ring fuses representational facial features with frankly modernist form in a compact object meant for the hand. The mask motif, drawn from Mexico's deep Pre-Columbian and folk reservoir, is pushed toward the futuristic through the angular projections of the headdress, a tension between ancient subject and modern line that defines the best Taxco design.

The ring is recorded in Gobi Stromberg's Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda (2008), p. 86, plate 68, where its place in the modernist current of mid-century Taxco silver is documented.

Los Castillo, founded in 1939 by Antonio Castillo and his brothers after their departure from William Spratling's Las Delicias (Morrill, p. 166), was one of the large talleres that gave the Taxco School its range, working stone and metal together with a sculptor's confidence. A piece marked Chara within the workshop's orbit carries that lineage of inventive, three-dimensional design.

Mask rings of this kind, combining hardstone with modeled silver, are uncommon, and a documented example carries the added weight of its appearance in the published literature.