Featuring previously unseen works from Luchita Hurtado’s Sky Skin series, this exhibition examines a body of works made by the artist which create an explicit link between the body and the cosmos. From the mid-1970s onwards, Hurtado’s gaze turned upwards, inverting the perspectives inherent to the downward-facing angles of her earlier works. Hurtado’s Sky Skin series creates a direct connection to the universe that exists above our heads. The landscape of breast, stomach and knee is transformed into masterful constructions of sky, feathers and earth which continue the artist’s imaginative and deceptive experimentation with figurative landscapes. Hurtado’s skies are often encircled by craggy earth, emphasizing foreground proximity and the far-off distance of cloud, moon, and sky, punctuated occasionally in the near middle ground by airborne entities that underscore the abstract vastness behind them. Smooth and earthen surfaces combined with fantastical imagery; her skies also contain Magrittean links but adjust typical Surrealist tropes by focusing on the female as viewing subject rather than desired object. The works from this period were also informed by Hurtado’s newly reinforced feminist ideals and involvement with the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists.
Born in Maiquetía, Venezuela in 1920, Luchita Hurtado dedicated over eighty years of her extensive oeuvre to the investigation of universality and transcendence. Developing her artistic vocabulary through a coalescence of abstraction, mysticism, corporality and landscape, the breadth of her experimentation with unconventional techniques, materials and styles speak to the multicultural and experiential contexts that shaped her life and career.
Luchita Hurtado | Press Release
Download
