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拍品專文
1998 was an extremely productive year for Julio Galán. On the verge of turning 40, the artist who originated from the small ranching and mining town of Múzquiz, Coahuila in northern Mexico, lived and painted in a hotel room in Paris, France. And not just any hotel room, but room #111 at the luxurious 5-star Hotel Côstes on Rue Saint-Honoré near the Palace Vendôme in the city’s center. The description of the former 18th Century mansion renovated by designer Jacques Garcia as “characterized by opulence and a theatrical appeal, with revolutionary styles and superimposed elements from different time periods” (https://www.hotelcostes.com/en/history-decore/history#info) echoes the provocative and layered paintings, including the current lot Joy, which Galán created in this sumptuously rich environment. Photographer Gustavo Ten Hoever who lived across from the hotel and creatively collaborated with Galán during several photography sessions elucidated: “The Hotel Costes is a hotel of vampires. It is always dark 24⁄24 and you had the feeling of being in a world of darkness, intimate, and in a way that is what so attracted Julio and those who liked that ambiance of being in a parallel reality and half-light” (13 January 2022, personal communication). Reclusive, Galán worked at night preparing at least fourteen 6 x 4 ft. canvases for a solo exhibition at Paris’s Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac that spring and another eight paintings of this same large scale, including Joy, to comprise his solo exhibition “For Lissi” presented at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London that fall.
Galán’s career-long focus in his artmaking was on the self, through the self-portrait; here, as in many works in his oeuvre, the viewer gazes upon Galán’s distinct facial features merged with those of his youngest sister, Sofia. Eyebrow pencil, eyeliner, and ruby-red lipstick accentuate a thin face. Marrying the material world with the imagined, Galán attaches to the canvas a hair accessory of Chinchilla rooster coque tail feathers and pink roses of silk and tulle; a nod to his attraction to fashion, he toys with the relationship between natural and fabricated beauty. A close familial tie is underscored in his use of text, where he crowns the subject’s head with the note “Sofia, private life” both leaving a cryptic message of intrigue, and naming her, while simultaneously announcing his presence through his own childhood nickname, “Pollo”; they are one and the same, artist and sister.
Galán treats this gender fluid being throughout his oeuvre as a doll, who he can dress and undress, create and recreate, and through which he can reveal emotional and psychological complexity. In a poetic interview between himself and his eldest sister Elizabeth (Lissi), published in his 1998 solo exhibition catalogue by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, she poses the question “Is Sofia a muse to you?” to which he answers with the above epigraph, reflecting his constant cat-and-mouse play with what is hidden and what is revealed, and that which fulfills social expectation and that which is taboo or othered.
Galán captures that tension in this at once commanding and vulnerable central figure, in whom “joy” is not a quality immediately apparent. Sofia grasps in one hand the heart-topped scepter held by Lewis Caroll’s murderous Queen of Hearts while she pulls a rigid yet animate doll close to her chest with her other. Executioner, protector, mother, and child, she embodies multiple roles. Wearing a high-collared garment with an array of dots that recalls the patterning of an ermine fur coronation cape, she is nested in a curtain of repeated shapes, a backdrop-like strategy that Galán employs in contemporaneous paintings of 1998 such as Elena, Esos ojos, and Vida bailando con la muerte. While evoking the flower petal’s sensual, tactile, fragile and soft qualities, the motif is inspired by their opposite—the segmented, layered, and hard carapace shell of the endangered tortuga carey (Hawkbill Sea Turtle).
Having long engaged with this motif in his imagery, Galán identified with the carey’s precarious existence depicting himself as a turtle struggling to survive in Niño caguama (Turtle boy) of 1985, for example, or wearing a carapace on his back in Foto con disfraz de niñocaguama (Photograph with turtle boy disguise), a staged photograph of 1984. He further collected objects made of carey and visited Careyes, his friend Gian Franco Brignone’s turtle preserve and resort on the Pacific coast of Jalisco. It is precisely with this layering of imagery, meaning, material, and often paradox, that Galán ensnares his viewer.
Is joy something that the artist hoped for and found fleeting or unattainable? Is joy what the artist asks the viewer to contemplate? Perhaps, as Galán’s sister Sofia suggests, the painting’s title came to him when he finished Joy, and saw that he liked it (1 September 2025, personal communication).
Teresa Eckmann, Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio
Galán’s career-long focus in his artmaking was on the self, through the self-portrait; here, as in many works in his oeuvre, the viewer gazes upon Galán’s distinct facial features merged with those of his youngest sister, Sofia. Eyebrow pencil, eyeliner, and ruby-red lipstick accentuate a thin face. Marrying the material world with the imagined, Galán attaches to the canvas a hair accessory of Chinchilla rooster coque tail feathers and pink roses of silk and tulle; a nod to his attraction to fashion, he toys with the relationship between natural and fabricated beauty. A close familial tie is underscored in his use of text, where he crowns the subject’s head with the note “Sofia, private life” both leaving a cryptic message of intrigue, and naming her, while simultaneously announcing his presence through his own childhood nickname, “Pollo”; they are one and the same, artist and sister.
Galán treats this gender fluid being throughout his oeuvre as a doll, who he can dress and undress, create and recreate, and through which he can reveal emotional and psychological complexity. In a poetic interview between himself and his eldest sister Elizabeth (Lissi), published in his 1998 solo exhibition catalogue by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, she poses the question “Is Sofia a muse to you?” to which he answers with the above epigraph, reflecting his constant cat-and-mouse play with what is hidden and what is revealed, and that which fulfills social expectation and that which is taboo or othered.
Galán captures that tension in this at once commanding and vulnerable central figure, in whom “joy” is not a quality immediately apparent. Sofia grasps in one hand the heart-topped scepter held by Lewis Caroll’s murderous Queen of Hearts while she pulls a rigid yet animate doll close to her chest with her other. Executioner, protector, mother, and child, she embodies multiple roles. Wearing a high-collared garment with an array of dots that recalls the patterning of an ermine fur coronation cape, she is nested in a curtain of repeated shapes, a backdrop-like strategy that Galán employs in contemporaneous paintings of 1998 such as Elena, Esos ojos, and Vida bailando con la muerte. While evoking the flower petal’s sensual, tactile, fragile and soft qualities, the motif is inspired by their opposite—the segmented, layered, and hard carapace shell of the endangered tortuga carey (Hawkbill Sea Turtle).
Having long engaged with this motif in his imagery, Galán identified with the carey’s precarious existence depicting himself as a turtle struggling to survive in Niño caguama (Turtle boy) of 1985, for example, or wearing a carapace on his back in Foto con disfraz de niñocaguama (Photograph with turtle boy disguise), a staged photograph of 1984. He further collected objects made of carey and visited Careyes, his friend Gian Franco Brignone’s turtle preserve and resort on the Pacific coast of Jalisco. It is precisely with this layering of imagery, meaning, material, and often paradox, that Galán ensnares his viewer.
Is joy something that the artist hoped for and found fleeting or unattainable? Is joy what the artist asks the viewer to contemplate? Perhaps, as Galán’s sister Sofia suggests, the painting’s title came to him when he finished Joy, and saw that he liked it (1 September 2025, personal communication).
Teresa Eckmann, Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio