Julio Galán’s two-part exhibition at kurimanzutto and Luhring Augustine in Chelsea marks his first significant solo presentation in New York in over two decades. Spanning nearly his entire career, the paintings and pastels on view depict unsettling, dreamlike spaces where real and imagined characters merge with personal narratives. In this iteration of From the Archive, we look at the artist’s life—tragically cut short at the age of 47—and the charged visual language of a practice that presents identity as performed, fractured, and perpetually in flux.

Julio Galán was born in 1958 in the mining town of Melchor Múzquiz, Coahuila, Mexico. Unlike his two brothers, who embraced hunting on the family ranch, Galán enjoyed antiques, fashion, spending time with his two sisters, and playing with dolls gifted to him by his mother — whom he described as “an elegant and eccentric woman” who struggled to express affection.[1] These dolls served as lifelong companions that would later appear in his painitngs alongside portraits of his mother and sisters. 

At twelve, Galán began frequenting Guillermo Sepúlveda’s Galería Miró in Monterrey, drawn to works by Mexican artists like Gunther Gerzo and Rafael Calzada. “I wanted to express myself in color,” he recalled, “but back then, I didn’t understand that I could paint for a living.”[2] After graduating high school in 1976, he committed to becoming an artist, though his parents insisted on formal education. Uninterested in academic training in art, he enrolled in architecture at Universidad de Monterrey in 1978, fulfilling requirements while focusing primarily on painting. During this time, he returned to Sepúlveda’s gallery—by then Galería Arte Actual Mexicano—seeking feedback and soon held his first solo exhibition there in 1980.

In 1984, after completing his architecture degree and gaining recognition through solo shows at Mexican galleries, Galán moved to New York, encouraged by Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Lowery S. Sims, who had visited his Monterrey studio. With just two thousand dollars in savings, “a perfume, an awesome pair of shoes, a crucifix and some clothes,” he settled in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment.[5] The move marked a turning point. “At the beginning I was very cautious, trying to avoid being influenced,” he later recalled. “I was afraid of following some other artist's flow [...] but I gained confidence in what I do."[6] Though he admired Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sigmar Polke, and Julian Schnabel, Galán stayed true to his own vision, producing guised self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes, collage-laden works that blurred the line between canvas and reality.

His entry into New York’s art world came swiftly. Fashion designer Nicole Miller became an early supporter after seeing El ropero de Sofía (Sofia’s Wardrobe, 1983), which featured one of her dresses. In 1985, she displayed Paseo por Nueva York con dolor de cabeza y barajas de lotería (Stroll Through New York with a Headache and Lottery Cards, 1984) in her Tribeca loft and hosted a party where Galán met Paige Powell, then advertising manager at Interview, Andy Warhol’s avant-garde magazine. Powell quickly became a key advocate, organizing his first solo exhibition in New York.

Later that year, at a solo show organized by Paige Powell in critic Edit deAk’s SoHo apartment, Galán documented opening night in a photo album, capturing Warhol arriving with his camera. The two bonded over antiques, celebrities, and Camp aesthetics. Warhol admired Galán’s work and proposed a trade—his portrait of Galán’s in exchange for El Hermano / Niño berenjena y niña Santa Claus (The Brother / Eggplant Boy and Santa Claus Girl, 1985), a diptych self-portrait in which Galán appears in an eggplant suit on one side and a red dress on the other, alluding to eroticism and gender fluidity. Warhol’s death in 1987 curtailed the exchange.

Throughout his career, Galán resisted the labels attached to his work. Though often linked to Surrealism, he admitted only that his art followed “a little bit in the path of Surrealism,”[7] emphasizing instead its autobiographical roots. Like Frida Kahlo—an artist he was frequently compared to—he resisted the Surrealist label. Kahlo famously said, “I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality,”[8] and Galán took a similar stance, grounding his work in personal experience veiled by symbolic imagery he believed needed no biographical context to be understood. He also dismissed comparisons to Kahlo as superficial, noting that while both expressed pain through their work, their lives and methods differed significantly. His inclusion in MoMA’s Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century in 1993—alongside Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Wifredo Lam, and Ana Mendieta—exemplified his rising international profile, even as such labels failed to capture the complexity of his practice.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Galán expanded his practice into ceramics, reimagining the visual language of his paintings and drawings in three dimensions. Collaborating with Roberta Brittingham Sada’s Taller de Arte y Diseño and Cerámica Regiomontana in Monterrey, he worked with artisans who shaped his designs from clay slabs. Galán painted and finished the fired sculptures, using a white base glaze as a foundation. Though painting remained his primary focus, he produced at least twenty-five ceramic works, including high-fired and glazed orbs such as M. Posewhite (1989) and Untitled (Pelea de Brujas) (Untitled, Witch Fight, 1990). These sculptures gave his expressive faces a new dimensionality, further deepening the complexity of his work.

In 1993, Graciela Iturbide photographed Galán in a series of staged portraits in Monterrey. She later described the experience as a blend of intention and spontaneity—much like his painting process. In one series, Galán shifted between angel and Christ, embodying both suffering and transcendence. Through such collaborations, Galán shaped a fluid visual persona that explored queerness. Whether through bold provocation or subtle gesture, his photographic performances rejected fixed identity, treating it instead as an ongoing act of construction and negotiation.

In his final years, Galán withdrew from public life. The loss of his mother, María Elisa, in 1999 deeply affected him, intensifying his isolation. Though he continued to exhibit occasionally, his once-prolific output slowed. Friends described him as increasingly reclusive, avoiding calls and sleeping excessively. Overwhelmed by persistent melancholy, he retreated further from the art world. In 2002, however, his final retrospective during his lifetime opened at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (MACO). The show featured over forty works and traveled to the Museo Amparo in Puebla and the Museo de las Artes at the University of Guadalajara. During the opening at MACO, Francisco Toledo praised Galán, and the admiration was mutual—each naming the other Mexico’s most important living artist.

Galán often expressed a fear of flying, influenced by fortune tellers who warned he might die midair. On August 4, 2006, while traveling from Zacatecas to Monterrey, he died suddenly of a brain aneurysm or hemorrhage at age 47. His passing shocked many and was reported in local media and a New York Times obituary by Roberta Smith.