Mathias Goeritz was born in Danzig, Germany (now Gdańsk, Poland), in 1915, and spent his childhood and youth in Berlin. He began studying medicine in Berlin, but soon abandoned this in order to enrol at the Berlin-Charlottenburg School of Arts and Crafts, where he received his doctorate in Philosophy and Art History. In 1936, following the rise of Nazism, he left Germany. After visiting various European destinations, in 1941 he arrived in Morocco and in 1945 in Spain, where he worked alongside Joan Miró and Ángel Ferrant. In 1952 he moved to Mexico, where he settled until his death in 1990.

Although his first paintings are marked by the war and the influence of the German Expressionist groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, he soon moved on to abstraction and incorporated into his work an interest in architecture. The dialogue between painting and architecture remained central to the rest of his production, which became a significant influence on contemporary Mexican art and architecture. One of the main concepts of his aesthetic ideas is emotional architecture, an architectural current that favours very clean design and the construction of towers, always prioritising a feeling for the sculptural over the functional. Goeritz argued that architecture had to be a work of art, in the sense that it invites us to inhabit its different spaces in order to experience different emotions.