Life

His father was a merchant and farmer, a lover of literature who played violin in a local jazz band. Byron grew up in a house tied to culture, and showed his calling very young.

At sixteen he moved to Mexico City with a single aim: to study at the Academy of San Carlos.

Between 1958 and 1962 he studied under a generation of first-rate teachers — the Spanish painter Antonio Rodríguez Luna, the etcher Francisco Moreno Capdevila, Luis Nishizawa, Santos Balmori and Antonio Ramírez. In 1960 he was president of the student union.

From 1962 to 1964 he did graduate work in painting, and at the same time helped found the metal sculpture workshop of the National School of Visual Arts at UNAM.

In 1964 he mounted his first solo exhibition. The American actor and collector Vincent Price bought every piece in it. So that the show could go on, Byron painted forty-five new works in a single week. Astonished, Price called him “a Mexican Picasso.”

More than sixty solo exhibitions followed, in Mexico, the United States, Europe and Latin America, and over seventy-five group shows — among them the Museum of Modern Art and the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, the Polyforum Siqueiros, and galleries from Chicago and San Francisco to Rotterdam.

In 1973 he met Eva Beloglovsky, a young art dealer. Two years later she bought one of his paintings, sold two more within the week, and a partnership began that became, in time, a marriage. Together they traveled the world’s museums — Europe again and again — which Byron considered an essential schooling for any artist.

After years as an abstract expressionist, around 1980 he returned to the figure. His 1982 exhibition “Aspects of a Theme: Woman” at the Museo de Arte Moderno marked the turn. In 1996 the Palace of Fine Arts honored him with a retrospective of thirty years of painting across three of its halls.

From 1995 he served on the Council for Culture and the Arts of the State of Hidalgo, appointed by the governor. He received more than fifteen awards and honors.

In his last decade Byron worked at the scale of the landscape: the Millennium fountain at the gateway to Pachuca, and then the master plan and the immense central mosaic of the David Ben Gurion Cultural Park, the work that closed his life.

His work is held in important private collections in Mexico and abroad.