Although his career was followed by other artists and critics, he died in the early 1970s when painters of his generation were only beginning to receive widespread recognition for their work.
While meriting two major exhibits at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, one just after his death and a retrospective thirty years later in 2003, he and his work are not well known among younger Mexican painters.
[1] He initially began to work designing window displays for a pharmacy, studying aeronautical engineering at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional.
[2] In 1952, he received a grant from the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica to travel for two spending most of his time in Spain and various European capitals.
Later exhibits included Pan American Union Building in Washington in 1955, the Main Street Gallery in Chicago in 1957 and the Vieille Galerie in Brussels in 1958.
[1] He was a guest lecturer at Notre Dame University in Indiana in 1966 and later gave classes at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1972.
[2][4] Echeverría established his career at a time when there as a struggle between the older figurative artists of the Mexican School of Painting and the more abstract work of the following generation.
[5] For this reason his work was considered important by contemporary artists and art critics during his life, followed by Raquel Tibol, Margarita Nelken and Pablo Fernandez Marqués .
[4] In its retrospective called Tiempo Suspendido in 2003, the Palacio de Bellas Artes divided Echeverría’s work into four phases.
[4][5] He felt he owed much to Spanish painting such as that by Velázquez, El Greco, Goya, Gutiérrez Solana and Picasso during a phase where his work was strongly influence by Impressionism.