By Clare Beezhold
Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s newest exhibit “Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn” gives viewers the opportunity to experience Hurtado’s work in her first public institutional show ever with paintings spanning over her 80-year career.
The paintings on display in this exhibition have an original view of the world that is both grounded and transcendental, and the subject matter makes use of unexpected perspectives shedding new light on different angles viewers may not have noticed before. This use of different perspectives, such as straight down or across her own body, allows for a geometric abstraction that is unique to her work. Hurtado’s paintings achieve a vision of the human body as part of nature, rather than a separate entity which is beautiful. By pairing intimate motions of the body with broad views of natural landscapes, Hurtado is able to capture the connection between humans and their natural surroundings.
Hurtado was born in Venezuela in 1920 and emigrated with her mother at the age of eight to New York. Later, she traveled to Mexico situated at the center of the Surrealist scene in Mexico City. Eventually, Hurtado settled permanently in Santa Monica, California, in 1951 with her husband, painter Lee Mullican. Hurtado was associated with specific movements like Surrealism, the Dynaton Group and Magical Realism, but maintained her unique practice in private, rarely exhibiting her work. Aside from her painting, Hurtado is also known as a poet, an ecologist, a feminist and an activist-most known for her activism against climate change. She also designed her own clothes for many decades as she started her career in dressmaking as she attended school in New York.
Hurtado’s work consists of emotive graphite and ink drawings, crayon and ink paintings on board and paper and oil paintings on paper and canvas. She has taken herself and surroundings as her subject primarily and stuck to the major themes of nature and language. Hurtado has done a spectacular job of capturing the relationship between the self and nature in her displayed work. The symbol of a dancing figure is repeated often in her work, for example, in a series of paintings created in the last 12 months on display for the 1st time in this exhibition which is breathtaking and awe-inspiring to onlookers.
One of the collections on display is the ‘I Am’ works, a collection of paintings including portions of body parts including hands, wrists, toes, feet and breaks, that break through the edges of picture frames. This collection falls into the realm of private consciousness giving it a unique and personal feeling to the viewer. This private view downward contains no real protagonist and very few spacial cues. The figures stand above floors and rugs crisscrossed with zigzags, diamonds, stripes, and chevrons of Latin weavings. The images are of invented snapshots which are very thought-provoking because of their impossibility. The most memorable pieces are those that take an artist’s-eye-view of her own body.
After taking in this exhibit, the retrospective exhibition is that later works can inform earlier works as well as the other way around. As the viewer looks onto the artist’s newer works, one can recognize how Hurtado’s entire career has revolved around the different ways the human body is woven into the fabric of worldly textures.
“Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn” is currently on exhibit at LACMA Feb. 16 through May 3. For more information regarding this and future exhibits, visit www.lacma.org
Leave a Reply