Last fall, Roberto Gil de Montes had his first solo exhibition in Mexico, Temporada de lluvias, at kurimanzutto, Mexico City. On the occasion of the exhibition, we presented a complementary selection of Gil de Montes’s historical artworks and archival materials at the gallery and online. The display traced six decades of the artist’s career, from his formative years as a student at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles to more recent years in La Peñita, a small fishing town on the Pacific Coast of Nayarit, Mexico.

Over the past year, we continued our research through numerous conversations with Gil de Montes and members of his community that are both integral to and have significantly contributed to the story of his life and work. Additionally, we consulted institutional and personal archives and spent time in the artist’s studio and home in La Peñita. Concurrent with the opening of Gil de Montes’s solo exhibition, Reverence in Blue, at kurimanzutto, New York, we presented the second iteration of From the Archive: Roberto Gil de Montes, both at the gallery and in the visual essay below. 

Gil de Montes was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1950, where he was influenced by the murals of José Clemente Orozco and the celebrations surrounding Día de Muertos at a young age. In 1965, he relocated to East Los Angeles with his family, where he became aware of the emerging Chicano Movement. He enrolled in Roosevelt High School and his education is enriched through visiting lectures by Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar. Years later, Jan Baum Gallery in Los Angeles represents both Gil de Montes and Saar, and they participate in many group exhibitions together.

After graduating from Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles, in 1968, Gil de Montes spent two years studying photography at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College. As part of a class assignment, he created a self-portrait in which he painted his face white. The photograph begins Gil de Montes’s ongoing use of masks in his artistic practice and illustrates early questioning around his cultural identity as a Mexican living in the United States.

As an undergraduate student at Otis Art Institute, Gil de Montes primarily focused on figurative drawing and painting. His sketchbook drawings from 1973 were made during drawing classes with Joseph Mugnaini and Charles White, who provided their students with traditional training in the medium. For the exhibition Twelve and Nine at Otis Student Gallery, he presented a twelve-part installation that featured wooden cutouts painted on both sides. The cutouts depict mythic figures wearing masks and surrounded by entwined serpents, all suspended from wires.

When he started the graduate program at Otis, the conceptual art movement in Los Angeles was burgeoning. Inspired by the teachings of Lynda Benglis, Guy de Cointet, and Joan Jonas, Gil de Montes began to experiment with minimalist painting, employing materials such as wax and encaustic, as well as delving into performance and photography.

In 1979, art historian and curator Carla Stellweg invited Gil de Montes to move to Mexico City to work at Museo de Arte Moderno and to guest edit a special issue of Artes Visuales devoted to Chicano/a art. Artes Visuales was the first contemporary art magazine in Mexico and the first bilingual arts magazine in Latin America. Among the artists featured in the issue were his friend and mentor Carlos Almaraz, whom he had met during graduate school at Otis Art Institute, and Almaraz’s wife and fellow artist, Elsa Flores. 

During the eighteen months he lived in Mexico City, Gil de Montes continued experiments in photography. He initiated a practice of painting on large-scale black-and-white photographs, which he termed “sporadic photomurals.” And example of this technique is Mexico City (1981), which blends photography and painting to expose the city’s pollution. While in Mexico, he took part in the significant group exhibition Hecho en Latinoamérica at Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes. In this exhibition, he presented a series of photographs, including Eddie Domínguez and Hose (1978). Domínguez, Gil de Montes’s partner, was featured in many of his early photographic works. 

In 2005, Gil de Montes had his final solo show at Jan Baum Gallery, where he exhibited works made during the five years he lived in San Francisco. The fractured face depicted in Oscar (2005) drew inspiration from the malevolence portrayed in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and the disturbing photographs of members of the United States Army and CIA committing war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The concept of observing a fractured personality reflected on a person’s face intrigued the artist, leading to the development of what Leah Ollman described in her review of the show for the Los Angeles Times as “faces composed of a splintered mosaic of jagged planes of rust and slate and gold.”