An artist of the mercados
In Mexico City, in the aisles of the capital’s vintage markets, between rusted typewriters and Nintendo 64 consoles, Manuel Baumen’s frames catch the eye. Masked luchadores, Virgins of Guadalupe haloed in gold, scenes of popular devotion — all painted not on the glass, but behind it.
Born in the Colonia Guerrero, Mexico City, on July 20, 1958, Manuel Baumen is 67 years old. The urge to create is old: « Desde que tengo uso de razón me gustó crear cosas » — “ever since I had the use of reason”, he says. Before painting, he ran a family restaurant; he started studies in art restoration that he never finished — « era muy caro », it was too expensive. Glass, he taught himself, as a self-taught artist, from the 1980s onwards. « De muñequitos no iba a vivir », his family used to tell him — “you won’t make a living off little figures” — « y ahora es de lo que vivo, gracias a Dios ».
Baumen is what is called a street artist in the primary sense: he doesn’t go through galleries, doesn’t publish press releases, has no website. He sells his pieces where Mexican folk art has always circulated: in the markets, always at the same spot. The vintage shop Fierro Viejo, an institution of the Colonia Condesa housed in architect Thomas Gore’s Edificios Condesa, calls him an « artista reconocido » and regularly shows his works in its changarro on Calle Juan de la Barrera; Baumen had partnered with them for a time, but the venture never took off — the launch fell in the middle of the pandemic. As for the American store Modela, specialised in Oaxacan crafts, which discovered him over ten years ago in a vintage mercado of the capital and continues to distribute his work, the artist himself admits he doesn’t know where it is: « no la ubico » — people come to buy without saying where they resell. His reputation travels without him.
In France, Tienda Esquipulas is one of the rare places where his original works can be obtained.
La pintura reversa: painting in reverse
The technique Baumen uses, reverse glass painting or pintura reversa en vidrio, is one of the oldest and most demanding in the history of folk art. Yet Baumen didn’t inherit it: he found it on his own, by experimentation. « Probé con diferentes materiales y me gustó el efecto que daba sobre el vidrio » — he tried other supports, and it was the effect of glass that held him. Without knowing it, he joined a tradition seven centuries old.
The principle is simple to state, brutal to execute: the artist paints on the back face of a glass plate. The viewer sees the work through the glass, from the other side. This forces work in strictly reverse order: foreground details (a luchador’s eyes, the features of a Virgin’s face) are painted first. The background comes last. Each layer must be thought through before it is laid. There is no possibility of correction.
This technique was born in Italy between the 13th and 16th centuries, first applied to reliquaries and portable altars in the form of engraved gilded panels. It spread across Europe — Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia — to become a flourishing folk art between 1550 and 1850. Jesuit missionaries took it to China, from where it reached Edo-period Japan. In Europe, it was produced through a division of labour that allowed series production, sold by peddlers or in markets. Exactly the way Baumen does it today in Mexico City, seven centuries later.
Baumen enriches his compositions with sequins, fabric, photographs, religious figurines and costume jewellery integrated into the paint — creating hybrid pieces between popular sacred art and contemporary assemblage. This ex-voto aesthetic runs through many of his works: an acknowledged kinship with the Mexican votive tradition. His pieces, around 45 × 60 cm, are signed on the back.
Glass is not his only medium: Baumen also works on cardboard, wood and metal sheet, choosing the material according to the composition he imagines. “It’s like a puzzle”, he explains: he assembles, adjusts, starts over if something doesn’t satisfy him. His method is a trabajo de primera intención — a first take at instinct, then the look, then the redo: « Voy trabajando como voy, conforme voy viendo la pieza ; si no me gusta, la vuelvo a repetir hasta que quedo satisfecho — ahí es cuando me tardo. » The time he takes isn’t slowness ; it’s iteration. The idea often starts from a found object — “when I buy a frame or a box, I see it and in my head I already know how it will end up”. A piece takes him between three and fifteen days depending on its complexity. Forty years at that pace add up, by his own estimate, to around two thousand works — frames, niches and boxes combined. « No he pensado en eso, porque disfruto lo que hago », he adds: he never thought to count, because he loves what he does.
Lucha libre: the mask as icon
Baumen’s first major subject is lucha libre.
In Mexico, lucha libre is not merely a sporting spectacle. Since July 21, 2018, it has officially been part of Mexico City’s intangible cultural heritage. The luchadores’ masks function as “portable metaphors”: their geometric motifs, their animal or cosmic references, code a moral identity. Sharp angles signal aggression; broad curves evoke nobility. Losing one’s mask in an apuestas match is a stage sacrilege.
Lucha iconography has nourished generations of artists: photographer Lourdes Grobet, who documented lucha libre for decades; Mexican-American painter David Gremard Romero, who blends pre-Hispanic codices and luchadores in a cosmos between myth and postmodernism; Chihuahuan muralist Miguel Valverde, author of the famous mural at the Arena México; or Dr. Rabias, painter of the arenas whom we have already presented on this site.
For Baumen, the appeal of lucha libre comes from far: two of his brothers practiced as amateurs, and he himself grew up watching the films of El Santo, whom he describes as his childhood idol. Today, the luchador he most admires is Rey Misterio — “muy bueno”, he confides.
Baumen joins this lineage, but by a different path. No canvas, no wall, no photo print: glass. His luchadores — Blue Demon, Mil Máscaras, El Santo — look at us through the transparent matter, fixed in a technique that demands the same discipline as combat: every gesture is irreversible.
La Guadalupana: faith and identity
The second pillar of Baumen’s work is the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Morenita del Tepeyac.
La Guadalupana is the dominant symbol of Mexican religiosity, well beyond Catholic devotion alone: she stands for identity, unity and national culture. Since colonial times, her iconography has woven together the codes of European baroque and indigenous symbols — local flowers, elements of Nahua cosmogony — in a visual synthesis that served both evangelisation and the assertion of a mestiza identity.
To this day, the Guadalupana runs through Mexican folk art in every form: ceramics, plaster, medals, street altars, graffiti. Baumen’s work on glass joins this living tradition, adding to it the luminous and fragile dimension proper to pintura reversa: the Virgin seen through the glass, as through a secular stained-glass window.
For the artist, the subject is also personal: Baumen declares himself devoto — a devotee of the Guadalupana — and paints her as much for himself as for his clients.
Tienda Esquipulas offers a whole collection dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe: resin statues from 15 to 50 cm, silk-screened candles, colourful nichos and milagros, all objects that share with Baumen’s works this porous frontier between sacred art and folk art.
Beyond the classics
If lucha libre and the Guadalupe remain his recurring motifs, Baumen also accepts more singular commissions, mapping an unexpected geography of Mexican popular culture. He has painted ex-votos from old family photographs, tributes to the Santa Muerte and to Jesús Malverde — figures of popular devotion at the border of the licit. He has also received more surprising requests: Barbie, Mickey Mouse, dog portraits, compositions on the theme of cantinas and pulquerías, those popular bars of Mexico City. “Es lo que a veces me pide la gente y el cliente paga”, he sums up without posturing — he does not draw a line between vocation and commission, he simply makes.
One request marked him in particular: « Una vez una señora me pidió que le hiciera un altar con la foto de su esposo, con su pelo y uñas. ¡Que loco! » — a lady had asked him for an altar with her husband’s photograph, his hair and his nails. In Mexico, the line between sincere devotion and magical practice has never been drawn sharply: Baumen, without judgment, made the piece.
Manuel Baumen, artisan or artist?
How does he define himself? « Yo artesano, pero dicen que soy artista. » The line is worth pausing on: in the Mexican context, the line between arte and artesanía is one of the most politically charged. Institutions, galleries, magazines define the artist. The artisan, by contrast, makes. Baumen claims the second word — and leaves the first to others.
His acknowledged kinships come as a surprise. In painting, he cites Alberto Gironella, a major figure of 20th-century Mexican plastic art, heir to the Interioristas, known for his assemblages and black queens. In cinema, the entire cine de oro era, El Santo above all, and horror films. In music, « la música disco, el Bossa Nova y los boleros ». A cartography that mixes high and low, Mexican and Brazilian, sacred and Saturday-night ballroom — exactly the substance of his glass.
Has he passed on his technique? Not in pintura reversa. But he has held workshops in manual arts as anti-stress therapy. His practice remains his own; his pedagogical gesture aims elsewhere — at the mental health of those he welcomed.
That leaves the question of the institutional world. Why no gallery, no museum, no show abroad? Not by refusal. « No tengo pasaporte para salir, y es muy caro para mí. » Exhibitions of his work have indeed taken place — « pero yo no he estado ». He wasn’t there. The frontier between folk art and the art world is not only one of gestures or subjects: it is also one of an administrative document and a plane ticket.
Alternative art, folk art
Manuel Baumen appears in no institutional database, no museum catalogue, no art review. And that may be precisely what makes his work significant.
In Mexico, folk art — arte popular — has never needed the validation of galleries to exist. It circulates in mercados, tianguis, changarros. It is bought by people who never set foot in a museum. It is made by artists who do not write artist statements. Baumen belongs to that tradition while renewing it: his technique is European and medieval, his subjects Mexican and contemporary, his materials (sequins, photographs) those of assemblage.
His clientele says the same thing. Who buys his pieces? « Mexicanos, extranjeros, coleccionistas, gente del barrio » — « exactamente todos », he replies without sorting. From the neighbour next door to the foreign collector, from passing tourists to families from the barrio, his audience is transversal. No one has a monopoly on his work, and that’s another way of refusing the usual segmentations of the art market.
It is an art that refuses the separation between sacred and profane, between high and low, between tradition and bricolage. A luchador on glass is a secular ex-voto. A Guadalupe with sequins is a mercado altarpiece.
Sources:
- Interview with Manuel Baumen (written exchange, May 2026) — interview by Ana Carrillo, biographical and technical quotes
- Fierro Viejo, Mexico City: Facebook video « Arte del reconocido Manuel Baumen »
- Reverse glass painting, Wikipedia
- UNAM Global: « La Virgen de Guadalupe: símbolo dominante de la religiosidad mexicana »
- Artbank: « Arte y Lucha Libre Mexicana: máscaras, símbolos y creatividad »