On view through 24 September, Luchita Hurtado features works rarely exhibited during the artist’s lifetime. These drawings and paintings on paper allow viewers to inhabit Hurtado’s gaze to look down onto fragments of her body as if it was their own—through the use of dramatic foreshortening and tight cropping. Thus, Hurtado’s breasts, stomach, arms, hands, legs, and feet, shown from a perspective seldom offered in the history of portraiture, become those of the viewer. Reinforcing the quiet privacy of these scenes, Hurtado is often depicted performing such quotidian activities as reading, holding a spoon, or simply taking a step. The quickness of the artist’s ink marks, delicate application of paint, and soft rubbing of charcoal amplify the immediacy and poignancy of these works.

Hurtado began the I Am series (which includes both works on paper and on canvas) in the late 1960s and continued the series while living in Santiago, Chile, with her husband, the painter Lee Mullican, and their two sons. While in Chile, Hurtado used her closet as a studio; its confined dimensions contributed to the dramatic perspective and lighting–often just a beam of light through the closet door – in the final images. Hurtado used these portraits not only to observe her body ‘in the flesh,’ but to look inward as well, suggesting that her time spent working in that makeshift studio afforded valuable moments of introspection.