In a career that spanned eight decades, Luchita Hurtado worked with diverse media including crayon, oil, watercolour, and graphite, drawing from and merging elements of 20th-century Surrealism, Magic Realism, abstraction, and environmentalism in her oeuvre.
Read MoreBorn in Venezuela, Luchita Hurtado moved to New York at a young age and studied fine arts at Washington Irving High School in Manhattan. An untitled graphite drawing from 1938—made when she was just 18—foreshadows some of the concerns that would later appear throughout her oeuvre: the use of a bird's-eye view to depict a stove burner and the artist's interests in subjective experiences and light.
Luchita Hurtado spent most of her adult life surrounded by artists and intellectuals such as Isamu Noguchi, Roberto Matta, Rufino Tamayo, Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, and Marcel Duchamp. Upon moving to California in 1949, Hurtado also became associated with the Dynaton group—a movement that explored automatism and the notion of timelessness in art—whose proponents included Hurtado's second and third husbands (Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican respectively).
In spite of her extensive friendship with other artists and prolific productivity, Luchita Hurtado shied away from showing her works publicly for much of her career. Engaged with child-rearing, she was also only able to paint in spare moments, sometimes using the closet as her studio. In her 'I Am' series of the 1960s, Hurtado painted her own body by looking down at it. Appearing naked and foreshortened, the artist's body contrasts patterned rugs (Untitled, 1969) or holds a cigarette in one hand (Untitled, 1971).
The breadth and versatility of Hurtado's interests can be seen in her more abstract and geometric paintings that were created alongside her self-portraits. Lines of orange wrap around contours in green and blue in Untitled (1968), while stripes concentrate into circles in Vertigo (1973). The 1970s also saw Hurtado painting with an upward view; in a body of work that she refers to as 'Sky Skin', feathers and clouds appear against the sky in a manner reminiscent of René Magritte and Magic Realism.
In more recent decades, Hurtado incorporated her environmental concerns into her work, adding texts such as 'We Are Just a Species' and 'Water Air Earth' to paintings from the 21st century. In others, such as Untitled (Birthing Mother Earth) (2018), the artist depicted a body giving birth to celestial bodies. As the artist said in her 2019 interview with Ursula, she considered herself as related to nature.
After decades of obscurity, Hurtado's work has been exhibited internationally following her re-discovery by Ryan Good, director of the estate of Lee Mullican, in 2015. In 2019, London's Serpentine Galleries organised I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn: a retrospective exhibition of her work that travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the following year.
Just Down the Street, Hauser & Wirth, Zürich (2020); Dark Years, Hauser & Wirth, New York (2019); Luchita Hurtado: Selected Works, 1942–1960, Park View, Los Angeles (2016); Luchita Hurtado: Grandview One, The Woman's Building, Los Angeles (1974).
Bodyscapes, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2020); Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); The Mystical in Art: Chicago/Latino Painting, Carnegie Art Museum, California (1994); Invisible/Visible, Long Beach Museum of Art, California (1972).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2020
