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Lot Essay
Recently, lines of people wrapped around the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City awaiting entrance to Julio Galán’s (1958-2006) exhibition, Un conejo partido en la mitad. Interviewed by Guillermo Osorno for Canal 22 on June 25, 2022, Curator Magali Arriola described an overwhelming reception of more than 15,000 viewers, especially young people, who had arrived in the week following the exhibition’s opening. Galán’s draw for contemporary audiences can in part be attributed to the timeless, universal, and inclusionary aspects of his artwork, while maintaining intimacy. Such qualities are key to Silenzio, a large-scale painting of the artist’s mature period, representative of his at once personal, and dialogical imagery.
During the months prior to his solo exhibition scheduled for May 18-June 30, 1996 at Annina Nosei’s Chelsea gallery in Manhattan, Galán retreated to his studio/home in the Colonia Bosques de San Ángel in Monterrey’s San Pedro Garza García neighborhood, where he turned primarily to photographic sources to create a body of paintings. Several of the eleven paintings that he produced for the exhibition featured muses such as a waiter, “Rado” (Rado), from the Café Borghia in SOHO who caught Galán’s attention, his close friend Catalina Macias (Blue Blue), his beloved cousin Golo (Rondine Amorosa), and his sisters Elizabeth (Hungry Proof) and Sofía (in Silenzio, companion piece to Hungry Proof).
Critics Charles Michener and Peter Schjeldahl writing about the exhibition for the New Yorker and the Village Voice respectively, each singled out Silenzio for its enigmatic quality, a reproduction of the artwork accompanying their reviews (“Satin Doll,” The New Yorker, June 10, 1996; “Hecho en Mexico,” The Village Voice, June 4, 1996, p. 79). Complaining of the difficulty in categorizing Galán’s artwork, Schjeldahl stated of the exhibition, “We see readily enough what his work is about—sexualized spirituality, memories of radiant childhood, antic gender bending—but the drift of it all is ungraspable,” as he pondered whether Galán’s work was Surrealist or Magic Realist, but labeled it “definitively neo-Expressionist” (ibid.). While Galán’s paintings can be dream-like, for example in his dissolving of the figure’s torso into the landscape in Silenzio, Galán’s imagery is grounded in the (artifice of the) everyday. His interest in materiality and the object are apparent in his incorporation of ribbon and costume jewelry on the canvas, and his intentional tearing of a hole in its surface. Schjeldahl rightly observed that Silenzio’s “arranged components have the declarative punch of a rebus” (ibid.) Notable is that to the right of the letter “P” that Galán paints on the surface of the ball/pearl, is a hole in the canvas, or “hoyo.” In his love of the rebus, or word play and secret codes, here he likely points to the nickname given to him by his family, “Pollo” (P + hoyo=Pollo). At constant play in Galán’s practice is a puzzle of parts that form a whole.
In their reviews, Schjeldahl and Michener both invoked André Bretón’s proclamation that Frida Kahlo was a “ribbon around a bomb” as a way of summarizing Galán’s similar complexity (as well as pointing to the physical ribbon hanging from the canvas center). And while early in his career Galán acknowledged his sympathy with Kahlo, later he vehemently rejected any relevance between his work and his predecessor’s. Even so, considering Silenzio alongside Kahlo’s The Two Fridas (1939) reveals not only similar social concerns, but the importance of photography to both artists, in addition to the shared focus more commonly identified by scholars on the non-heteronormative, as well as on dress/costuming, with which they both construct and dismantle identity. Just as Kahlo used a family memento, a photographic portrait of her mother in her wedding gown as the source for her Europeanized self in her double self-portrait as means to question gendered roles and social expectations, so too Galán studied a family photograph as a reference for Silenzio: a striking wedding portrait of Sofía Galán photographed in 1987 in Múzquiz, Coahuila, their family home.
In Silenzio, Galán has transformed the three-strand choker of large pearls around Sofía’s neck into a single, long strand of dark Hawaiian kukui nuts affixed to the canvas—symbolic of light, protection, and royal standing. The artist captures exactly in the painting the filagree earrings Sofía wears in the photograph, and her bold, direct gaze. Casting aside her wedding gown, Galán places center-stage a stiff, taffeta silk skirt that fills the canvas, the striped fabric cut on the bias to create the pattern of hard-edged v-shapes. Collapsing time, Galán, in the best post-modern manner, evokes the legacy of the court portraiture of Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez, and Franz-Xaver Winterhalter, while directly appropriating the garment from contemporary high fashion.
Turning to the pages of a fashion magazine, perhaps Vogue, Galán’s attention was captured by models in luxurious taffeta gowns from the opening spectacle presented by talented young designer John Galliano at a Paris runway show at the rugby stadium, the Stade de France on January 21, 1996. Galliano introduced his spring/summer “The Princess and the Pea” couture collection for the house of Givenchy with a scene from the familiar fairytale as models in billowy ball gowns sat atop a twenty-foot tall pile of mattresses. Galán’s friend Catalina Macias, who modeled for Blue Blue (1996), recalls Galán’s fascination at the time for Galliano’s fashion (T. Eckmann, personal communication, August 7, 2022). Painting Silenzio, Galán clothed Sofía in none other than Galliano’s skirt.
Exploring complex identity is what most interests Galán. In much of his oeuvre, subject and artist appear one and the same, irrespective of gender. At times, he names his sister in his titles, as with Sofía vestida de china poblana of 1993. But unlike the latter, or his painting Tehuana del Isthmus of Tehuantepec of 1987, whose empty, cut-out face above a voluminous costume allows all to assume the Tehuana’s indigenous and matriarch identity, in Silenzio, Galán puts forth no overt national statement of belonging. Rather, he presents a poetic meditation on self-possession as he invites the viewer to weigh human mystery against imposed social and gendered constructions.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio
During the months prior to his solo exhibition scheduled for May 18-June 30, 1996 at Annina Nosei’s Chelsea gallery in Manhattan, Galán retreated to his studio/home in the Colonia Bosques de San Ángel in Monterrey’s San Pedro Garza García neighborhood, where he turned primarily to photographic sources to create a body of paintings. Several of the eleven paintings that he produced for the exhibition featured muses such as a waiter, “Rado” (Rado), from the Café Borghia in SOHO who caught Galán’s attention, his close friend Catalina Macias (Blue Blue), his beloved cousin Golo (Rondine Amorosa), and his sisters Elizabeth (Hungry Proof) and Sofía (in Silenzio, companion piece to Hungry Proof).
Critics Charles Michener and Peter Schjeldahl writing about the exhibition for the New Yorker and the Village Voice respectively, each singled out Silenzio for its enigmatic quality, a reproduction of the artwork accompanying their reviews (“Satin Doll,” The New Yorker, June 10, 1996; “Hecho en Mexico,” The Village Voice, June 4, 1996, p. 79). Complaining of the difficulty in categorizing Galán’s artwork, Schjeldahl stated of the exhibition, “We see readily enough what his work is about—sexualized spirituality, memories of radiant childhood, antic gender bending—but the drift of it all is ungraspable,” as he pondered whether Galán’s work was Surrealist or Magic Realist, but labeled it “definitively neo-Expressionist” (ibid.). While Galán’s paintings can be dream-like, for example in his dissolving of the figure’s torso into the landscape in Silenzio, Galán’s imagery is grounded in the (artifice of the) everyday. His interest in materiality and the object are apparent in his incorporation of ribbon and costume jewelry on the canvas, and his intentional tearing of a hole in its surface. Schjeldahl rightly observed that Silenzio’s “arranged components have the declarative punch of a rebus” (ibid.) Notable is that to the right of the letter “P” that Galán paints on the surface of the ball/pearl, is a hole in the canvas, or “hoyo.” In his love of the rebus, or word play and secret codes, here he likely points to the nickname given to him by his family, “Pollo” (P + hoyo=Pollo). At constant play in Galán’s practice is a puzzle of parts that form a whole.
In their reviews, Schjeldahl and Michener both invoked André Bretón’s proclamation that Frida Kahlo was a “ribbon around a bomb” as a way of summarizing Galán’s similar complexity (as well as pointing to the physical ribbon hanging from the canvas center). And while early in his career Galán acknowledged his sympathy with Kahlo, later he vehemently rejected any relevance between his work and his predecessor’s. Even so, considering Silenzio alongside Kahlo’s The Two Fridas (1939) reveals not only similar social concerns, but the importance of photography to both artists, in addition to the shared focus more commonly identified by scholars on the non-heteronormative, as well as on dress/costuming, with which they both construct and dismantle identity. Just as Kahlo used a family memento, a photographic portrait of her mother in her wedding gown as the source for her Europeanized self in her double self-portrait as means to question gendered roles and social expectations, so too Galán studied a family photograph as a reference for Silenzio: a striking wedding portrait of Sofía Galán photographed in 1987 in Múzquiz, Coahuila, their family home.
In Silenzio, Galán has transformed the three-strand choker of large pearls around Sofía’s neck into a single, long strand of dark Hawaiian kukui nuts affixed to the canvas—symbolic of light, protection, and royal standing. The artist captures exactly in the painting the filagree earrings Sofía wears in the photograph, and her bold, direct gaze. Casting aside her wedding gown, Galán places center-stage a stiff, taffeta silk skirt that fills the canvas, the striped fabric cut on the bias to create the pattern of hard-edged v-shapes. Collapsing time, Galán, in the best post-modern manner, evokes the legacy of the court portraiture of Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez, and Franz-Xaver Winterhalter, while directly appropriating the garment from contemporary high fashion.
Turning to the pages of a fashion magazine, perhaps Vogue, Galán’s attention was captured by models in luxurious taffeta gowns from the opening spectacle presented by talented young designer John Galliano at a Paris runway show at the rugby stadium, the Stade de France on January 21, 1996. Galliano introduced his spring/summer “The Princess and the Pea” couture collection for the house of Givenchy with a scene from the familiar fairytale as models in billowy ball gowns sat atop a twenty-foot tall pile of mattresses. Galán’s friend Catalina Macias, who modeled for Blue Blue (1996), recalls Galán’s fascination at the time for Galliano’s fashion (T. Eckmann, personal communication, August 7, 2022). Painting Silenzio, Galán clothed Sofía in none other than Galliano’s skirt.
Exploring complex identity is what most interests Galán. In much of his oeuvre, subject and artist appear one and the same, irrespective of gender. At times, he names his sister in his titles, as with Sofía vestida de china poblana of 1993. But unlike the latter, or his painting Tehuana del Isthmus of Tehuantepec of 1987, whose empty, cut-out face above a voluminous costume allows all to assume the Tehuana’s indigenous and matriarch identity, in Silenzio, Galán puts forth no overt national statement of belonging. Rather, he presents a poetic meditation on self-possession as he invites the viewer to weigh human mystery against imposed social and gendered constructions.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio