roberto gil de montes
1950, Guadalajara, Mexico
Irreverent and serious, purposeful and inconclusive, Roberto Gil de Montes’ paintings explore the hidden images and forgotten or imagined stories of the exuberant everyday life that he sees. A black mark in the centre is a void, or an egg, a mass grave, or a dance floor, a stage, and also a veladora-flecked piece of earth for planting. The canvas is fertile terrain on which to realign the spaces between the real and the imaginary: figures float in abstraction or are laid across surfaces, misfits and explorers in their own habitat.
Roberto Gil de Montes was born in 1950 in Guadalajara, Mexico. As a teenager his family relocated to the United States where he later went on to receive a BFA and MFA from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. As a young artist he became involved in the Chicano art movement in and around Los Angeles, developing relationships with artists such as Carlos Almaraz. In the 1980s, he returned to Mexico City where he worked at the Museo de Arte Moderno and on Artes Visuales, the prestigious arts journal that explored visual culture in Latin America. Roberto returned to Los Angeles to concentrate on his painting practice and began to exhibit widely. He also became involved in the creation of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and began to show with Jan Baum Gallery, the only gallery at that time to show Black, Latinx and Asian artists on the West Coast. In 2000, he and his partner, Eddie, packed up their home in Echo Park and moved, via San Francisco, to La Peñita, a fishing town on the Pacific coast of Nayarit, Mexico, where they had spent many holidays. Roberto continues to live in La Peñita and paints in a studio directly overlooking the town plaza, a block from the coast.
untitled, 2021
oil on canvas
46.06 x 33.86 x 1.85 in.
lalo, 2020
oil on canvas
22.05 x 31.1 x 2.17 in.
untitled, 2020
oil on board
13.39 x 10.24 x 1.18 in.
rio grande, 2021
oil on canvas
40.08 x 70 x 1.97 in.
distance, 2020
oil on canvas
39.76 x 70.08 x 1.77 in.
the land developer, 2021
oil on canvas
70.87 x 78.74 x 2.17 in.
end of town, 2021
oil on canvas
29.61 x 39.45 x 1.77 in.
endangered species, 2021
oil on linen
58.58 x 58.86 x 1.57 in.
encuentro, 2020
oil on linen
22.83 x 39.17 x 1.1 in.
reading, 2016
oil on linen
15.12 x 20.98 x 1.42 in.
mystical south, 2017
oil on linen
75.61 x 90.16 x 2.17 in.
untitled, 2015
watercolor on paper
30.31 x 23.03 in.
riot, 2021
gouache on paper
13.98 x 11.02 in.
sangre en la jungla, 2021
gouache on paper
11.02 x 13.98 in.
chivito, 2021
gouache on paper
11.02 x 13.98 in.
victor sleeping, 2016
oil on canvas
8.86 x 11.81 x 1.18 in.
boy on river, 2020
oil on canvas
10.83 x 17.91 x 2.09 in.
el pescador, 2020
oil on linen
77.17 x 101.18 x 1.77 in.
the dream, 2020
oil on linen
23 5/8 x 39 1/2 in.
Gil de Montes was included in many solo and group exhibitions in the late 1980s, including the touring exhibition Le Demon des Anges organized by C.R.C.D., Nantes, France, and Centre D’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona, and the influential Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors. Touring venues included The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Brooklyn Museum, among others. More recently, in 2017, Gil de Montes was featured in another traveling exhibition, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A., organized by ONE Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries. The exhibition, presented in the context of the citywide event Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, mapped the intersections and collaborations between a network of queer Chicano artists and their artistic collaborators from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. In 2017, his personal archive was acquired by ONE Archives. In 2022, he was included in The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale and Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective at El Museo del Barrio in New York and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.Gil de Montes’s work is part of various public collections, such as the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Denver Art Museum, CO; Hammer Museum, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), CA; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Sifang Art Museum, China; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and X Museum, Beijing, China.
Gil de Montes’s work is part of various public collections, such as the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Denver Art Museum, CO; Hammer Museum, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), CA; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Sifang Art Museum, China; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and X Museum, Beijing, China.
read the full article in spanish written by constanza lambertucci on el país
real the full article in spanish on artishock
read the full article of the mexican pavillion at the venice biennale on the new york times
