STUDIOS: For Luchita Hurtado, Painting Is Like Breathing

Serpentine Galleries

02.12.2020

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“What drove me to paint? It was like breathing, you know. It’s hard not to.” — Luchita Hurtado

Last fall marked the first institutional solo exhibition of the remarkable Venezuelan painter Luchita Hurtado (b. 1920, Caracas, Venezuela) [barely two weeks older than Wayne Thiebaud! —ed.], I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn at the Serpentine Galleries in London. Now open for previews during Frieze week in Los Angeles is the only opportunity to catch this show in the United States, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, through May 3, 2020.

From LACMA:

Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn presents the first career survey of paintings and works on paper by multifaceted artist Luchita Hurtado (Venezuela, b. 1920). Prior to 2016, the remarkable breadth of Hurtado’s eight-decade career was virtually unknown, as her works were kept in storage and out of public view for most of her life. This exhibition will introduce museum audiences to several distinct bodies of work, including Hurtado’s early forays into abstraction, her consistent use of the body as a subject, her experiments with language, and her recent engagement with issues of environment and ecology. Hurtado has lived and worked in Santa Monica since the early 1950s. In 2019 she was named to the Time 100 list of most influential people.

Serpentine Galleries visited with Hurtado and curators Rebecca Lewin and Hans-Ulrich Obrist about Hurtado’s life and career, and looked at highlights from the exhibition.