Raphael Fonseca – författare

Five decades of paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs from an essential Chicano artist, influenced by his careers in East Los Angeles and MexicoPublished with Denver Art Museum/Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Roberto Gil de Montes’ (born 1950) artistic trajectory is directly informed by his birth and early life in Mexico, his status as an immigrant and art student in the United States, his career in Los Angeles as a practicing artist and his subsequent move to La Peñita, a small coastal town in Mexico. His artworks imagine and connect both countries, making his paintings, photography, ceramics, prints, drawings and performances critical to the mutable notions of Latinx art and Latin American art.This book presents Gil de Montes’ career across time and geography, showing the transborder consciousness of his oeuvre. He affirms the male body as both subject and object of counter-hegemonic sexuality, and he explores the relationship between the human body and the landscape. In a transparent dialogue with the history of Surrealism in Latin America—and also with the tradition of ex-votos—the artist fills large canvas surfaces with characters who often find themselves in situations of pleasure, violence and existentialism.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra reimagines the world and deconstructs societal and cultural norms through her playful and surrealistic drawings and paper sculptures. Her work delves into shared and untold histories, trauma, desire, fantasies, and taboos. Born in Chile during the repressive Pinochet regime, she has lived and worked in Germany for decades, incorporating Latin American and European traditions into her unique artistic language. Her drawings - along with paintings, photographs, and films - explore mythologies, fantastical hybrid botanicals, diverse geographies, and text, with writing in Spanish, English, Italian, Latin, and German, that expands the possibilities of meaning for each image. She imbues the traditional technique of drawing with tactility by dipping finished drawings in beeswax, and she continues to challenge our preconceptions of what drawing can be by turning paper into three-dimensional sculptures. Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s work invites us in and exposes the mysteries and intimacies of our shared experiences.