kurimanzutto is pleased to introduce our selection of works for Paris+ par Art Basel 2023, which will have a focus on the paintings of Mexican-American artist Roberto Gil de Montes.
Irreverent but deadly serious, provocative and inconclusive, Roberto’s paintings explore the hidden images and forgotten or imagined stories of the Mexico he sees. Gil de Montes’ artistic practice is guided by disciplined attention and playful experiment. Whilst being marked by the eclectic influences of artists including, among many others, Marsden Hartley and the figurative painters of the Bay Area in the 1950s, there are also frequent references to pre-Hispanic artistic traditions. His paintings are often populated with lush, varied forms from dreams and daily experience, the iconography of Huichol art, and a powerful memorialization of what is left behind.
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. While most of the works in our selection are recent, a special historic work that details the past of the artist in Echo Park, Los Angeles, is featured in this year’s Paris+ presentation, aiming to represent the particularities of Robertos practice: a practice that has been informed by memories for decades in a place by the ocean where time seems to pass differently. A place where, as Roberto describes it, “there would sometimes be water, and other times no water.“
Born in Guadalajara in 1950, Gil de Montes moved to the United States at the age of twelve and spent his teens and early career in Los Angeles, where he became involved in the Chicano art movement. He moved to Mexico City in the 1980s, before returning to California and eventually being drawn back to Mexico. He is now settled in the rural fishing town of La Peñita de Jaltemba on the Pacific coast of Nayarit.
Paris+ par Art Basel
October 19 - 22, 2023
Booth D02
Grand Palais Éphémère
2 place Joffre
75007, Paris
