Gonzalo García

Statement

My artistic work as a painter is intimately related to my experience as a homosexual man and how my immediate context as a Mexican influences this experience. That is why for more than a half decade, I have been studying and reviewing Mexican films and novels from past decades, to thread them (within my work) with my current concerns.

My early paintings and drawings are more explicitly erotic because they focus exclusively on human flesh and depict the vulnerability of self-portraiture through the lens of intimacy and sex. Over time, I began to paint my friends in similar states, harnessing mystical and seductive realism in the works to evoke the physicality of each subject and the overall sense of desire. While these self-portraits allowed me to explore, and ultimately discover, who I was as a gay male artist, lately I have become more interested in working more metaphorically and bringing to life more subdued sexual motifs such as flowers with varied textures and colors, echoing the human body, and allowing the viewer to draw their conclusions.

Resume

Puebla, Mexico, 1985.

He studied Visual Arts at the Instituto Allende University, in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. His most recent work addresses different social and historical issues in Mexico based on novels written in the 40s and movies from the 70s and 80s of Mexico. He has had 12 individual exhibitions in Mexico and more than 20 collective exhibitions at various museums in Querétaro, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Sweden, Spain, and recently in New York and California. In 2013 he had an art residency at the Swedish Watercolor Museum, near the city of Gothenburg, where he obtained the Jóvenes Creadores FONCA Scholarship for the first time, in the discipline of painting. Likewise, he has been selected in several biennials throughout his career, such as the last XVII Rufino Tamayo Biennial of 2016-2017 and the José y Tomás Chávez Morado Biennial of 2018, where he obtained an honorable mention, as well as the last VI Pedro Coronel Biennial of Zacatecas.

In 2018 he obtained the Jóvenes Creadores FONCA Scholarship for the second time in the discipline of painting. In the same year, he was selected in the “Julio Castillo” Biennial of painting in the city of Querétaro, exhibited at the Libertad Gallery, as well as in a pop-up show of contemporary Mexican painting in Los Angeles, California, with the Emilia Cohen Gallery. In 2021 he had the support of the Jóvenes Creadores FONCA Scholarship for the third time, in the discipline of painting, in addition to an honorary mention in the 4th Edition of the Lumen Biennial, “Panorama” still exhibited at the beginning of 2022 at the Museo de la Ciudad, in Mexico City. At the end of 2022, he was the second-place winner at the VI Biennial of Painting J. A. Monrroy in the category of consolidated artists, the same year he received the support of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte (SNCA), in the discipline of painting.