Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn

This exhibition showcases the remarkable eight-decade career of ninety-nine-year-old artist Luchita Hurtado. Born in Maiquetía, Venezuela, in 1920, Hurtado moved to New York to live with her mother at the age of eight. An independent spirit from a young age, she chose to attend the all-girls Washington Irving High School in Manhattan to study art, unbeknownst to her family, who believed she was studying to be a dressmaker. By her early twenties, Hurtado was making art consistently, a habit she would later describe as “a need, like brushing teeth.” Yet for many years, this art-making took place mostly in private—at night, after her children were asleep, or in makeshift studio spaces as small as a closet.

Hurtado, who is still active as an artist, developed her fiercely original practice almost entirely independent of mainstream styles and movements. Hallmarks of her work include forays into abstraction, experiments with language, engagements with nature and ecology, and, most significantly, a persistent recourse to self-portraiture and the human figure. Some of these motifs reappear in multiple bodies of work or in combination with one another. Throughout her paintings and drawings, Hurtado consistently plays with the possibilities of line, color, pattern, and form.

Although she is truly a citizen of the world (having lived in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Italy, and Chile, among other places), Hurtado has primarily resided in Santa Monica since the early 1950s. It is especially fitting that LACMA, with its dual commitments to presenting the history of art in Southern California and championing the work of women artists, now has the opportunity to share Hurtado’s work with her hometown audience.

Hurtado has spoken of the feather as a mysterious symbol, one that retains a kind of magic through its apparent weightlessness. In some of the paintings here, feathers appear to float up to the sky, sometimes coming together to suggest facial features or figures.

The earth, particularly humans’ connection to nature and the cosmos, has been an important subject for Hurtado ever since she saw the first photograph of Earth taken from space. She has returned to themes of environmental activism and ecological awareness in recent work.

Oil on canvas
© Luchita Hurtado

In the late 1960s, Hurtado began painting self-portraits from the vantage point of the artist looking steeply downward at her own body. In some paintings we see only her feet, knees, and hands; in others we also see her breasts and bare stomach. Hurtado often poignantly incorporated everyday objects—a toy car, ball of string, potted plant, drinking glass—into her compositions. Such works hint at a painting practice faithfully maintained during moments carved out from domestic family life.

Lithograph
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum Purchase with County Funds
70.4.92

Whereas the paintings on the opposite wall are all composed from the perspective of the artist looking down at her body, the works on this wall showcase Hurtado’s experiments with her silhouette as a compositional element. We also see examples of Hurtado’s more conventional self-portraits, in which her solemn face looks directly out at the viewer.

In 1946, Hurtado traveled with artist Wolfgang Paalen (who would soon become her second husband) to the San Lorenzo region of Mexico to see the Aztec and Olmec sites of Tenochtitlan and La Venta. Her photographs of Olmec heads and other archaeological relics, a selecion of which are shown here, were published in 1952 in Cahier d’Arts, accompanying an article titled “Le Plus Ancien Visage du Nouveau Monde” (The Oldest Face of the New World).

The biomorphic forms and abstract shapes in Hurtado’s early works evoke a range of associations, from neolithic figurines to prehistoric rock art and automatic drawing techniques. During this period, Hurtado regularly worked in crayon, using a method called “ink resist.” For this technique, an ink wash is applied over areas rendered in crayon; because of the water-repelling properties of the waxy crayon, the ink permeates the paper only between the colored strokes. As one can see in the examples on view here, the contrast between dark ink wash and colored hues creates a dense and vibrant energy.

Acrylic and ink on paper
© Luchita Hurtado

Crayon and ink on paper
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Janet Dreisen Rappaport through the 2019 Collectors Committee
M.2019.50
© Luchita Hurtado

Ink on paper

Throughout her career, Hurtado has continually returned to the human figure and figure relationships. In the works on view in this section of the gallery, spanning from the 1950s to the present, we see bodies alone and in different states of interaction—figures embracing, Mother Nature as a figure, and, in recent works, images of birth.

Oil on canvas

Graphite on paper

These works represent a small selection of the numerous plant drawings Hurtado has made in her lifetime, and document her deep engagement with the natural world. In them we see samples of the weeds, flowers, and trees of the Santa Monica Canyon and of Taos, New Mexico, where Hurtado and her late husband Lee Mullican built a house in the 1970s and regularly spent summers.

Although Hurtado’s art practice took place mostly in private for almost eight decades, the one exception was in 1974, when she exhibited a group of large-scale paintings at the storied Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. The paintings here—a partial reconstitution of the works from the 1974 show—appear at first to be geometric abstractions, but most contain embedded words and phrases. Some of the canvases Hurtado cut into strips, reconfigured, and stitched back together again. The artist has explained about the genesis of these paintings:

I did many self portraits. And then at one point I decided I would use letters, and I did…. I started with a portrait that said, “I am.” And I decided that was as much me as my real face and figure. And so at one point I began then to write things. And I decided to cut them up and make them even more unlikely that you’d ever read what I had written. I accomplished that by cutting the painting into strips and then sewing them, and then stretching them.

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas and thread
© Luchita Hurtado

Acrylic and oil on unprimed canvas
© Luchita Hurtado

This exhibition was organized by the Serpentine Galleries (London), in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Generous support is provided by Elizabeth, Matthew, and Theodore Karatz and their families in honor of their mother, Janet Dreisen Rappaport. In-kind support is provided by Hauser & Wirth.

All exhibitions at LACMA are underwritten by the LACMA Exhibition Fund. Major annual support is provided by Kitzia and Richard Goodman, Jerry and Kathleen Grundhofer, Meredith and David Kaplan, and Jeffrey Saikhon, with generous annual funding from Terry and Lionel Bell, the Judy and Bernard Briskin Family Foundation, Kevin J. Chen, Louise and Brad Edgerton, Edgerton Foundation, Emily and Teddy Greenspan, Earl and Shirley Greif Foundation, Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross, Mary and Daniel James, David Lloyd and Kimberly Steward, Kelsey Lee Offield, David Schwartz Foundation, Inc., Mr. and Mrs. Anthony and Lee Shaw, Lenore and Richard Wayne, Marietta Wu and Thomas Yamamoto, and The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation.