Rafael Coronel emerged in the art world in Mexico at a moment of artistic confrontation and rupture. His unique expressionist figurative style of the 1960s explored psychological innermost feelings and emotions. Through the characters in his paintings—inspired by common men and women such as teporochos, sex workers, and the indigent—that he encountered on Mexico City’s streets, the artist captured the human existential angst of a changing society as it entered an industrial modernity. His artwork Todos juntos II underscores his interest in portraiture and his exquisite draftsmanship technique in the depiction of harrowing facial features, deformed hands, and bodies set against a spectral Umbrian chiaroscuro tonality reminiscent of Rembrandt, Goya, and baroque art. Executed in Casa Studio San Angel, the former studio of his father-in-law Diego Rivera, the large painting presents a group of three figures in profile clad in monk-like garments with two additional flanking figures floating in space, seemingly guiding them to an ominous fate. This almost theatrical composition and severe rendering signal the tensions of an introspective dark human subconscious in the ghastly expressions of an alienated and marginalized humanity which the artist first began to explore in in his series Witches of Salem of the late 1950s. This painting was completed for his solo exhibition at the Organization of American States in November 1965. Born in Zacatecas, Mexico into a family of artists—his grandfather decorated interiors of churches, his parents were musicians, and his older brother Pedro was a well-known painter and sculptor of the Generación de la Ruptura—Rafael Coronel wanted to be a soccer player for the Mexican League’s Club América. Moving to Mexico City in 1952 to study architecture at UNAM, he also became involved with painting. He was the winner of an art contest and a scholarship sponsored by the Instituto Nacional de la Juventud Mexicana which allowed him to attend Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda to study under Carlos Orozco Romero. Although his art school experience was short-lived, Coronel, at the behest of Carlos Mérida, soon became involved with Galería de Arte Mexicano and its owner Inés Amor. He held his first solo exhibition in 1956 at Amor’s gallery only to become its exclusive artist one year later. His career in the late 1950s and 1960s was marked by high-profile exhibitions such as the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana in 1958, a solo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1959, among others. In 1965 the year of his exhibition at the OAS, he took part of the Mexico Section, along Gunther Gerzso, in the Eight São Paulo Biennial in September- November where he was recognized with the Cordoba Award sponsored by Industrias Kaiser. With a significant and successful career spanning more than sixty years, Coronel is recognized as one of the most important artists of the generation after the muralists.