On view in the gallery office:

Gilbert "Magu" Luján
Images | Biography

John Humble began photographing the “paradoxes and ironies of Los Angeles” in 1979. He is a keen observer of this city of boundless asphalt, stucco, signage and mismatched patchworks of graffiti paint-overs. In 1981, Humble was one of eight photographers awarded an NEA grant to chronicle the city on its bicentennial. Then in 2007, The Getty Museum mounted a mid-career retrospective entitled, A Place in the Sun: Photographs by John Humble, accompanied by a monograph. Avoiding any stylistic affectations or cultural clichés associated with LA, Humble seeks to record empirical evidence, creating images that are “reminiscent of geological cross-sections or archeological excavations with layers of disparate natural and man-made elements compressed – a sampling of visual strata.” His current exhibition focuses on the contrasting architecture and the squeezing, wedging and overlapping of cultures in downtown Los Angeles (DTLA).

Concurrently, the gallery will present its fifth exhibition of Dan McCleary, who is regarded by Christopher Knight at the LA TIMES as “one of the finest figure painters working today.” McCleary employs classical methodologies and devices like the golden mean, as well as traditional building blocks of design: cube sphere, cylinder and cone. His everyday moments of LA life and simple still-lifes contain the gravity, structure and balance of Piero della Francesca. The new works are small paintings of quietly centered fruit, classic frontal portraits, and etchings of florals made recently in Oaxaca.

In an adjoining gallery, we will present linoleum-cut prints made by Javier Carrillo, Roberto Ortiz and Jairo Perez from the print department of Art Division, a non-profit art school for young adults in the Rampart District of LA, founded and directed by Dan McCleary. Images made by Carrillo in particular, share McCleary’s simple purity of a singular form on a flat background. His little pick-up truck overloaded with stacks of wooden palettes has the flat, bold power of Manet’s Fifer.

Finally, the gallery is pleased to announce representation of the estate of Gilbert “Magu” Luján. One of the members of the legendary Chicano arts collective, Los Four, Luján and his compatriots Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero, and Robert De La Rocha, drew attention to Chicano art in the 70s with murals and public art projects. Luján invented a plethora of mythical/fanciful creatures and cultural oddities; dogs shaped like pyramids, brilliantly colored low-rider cars inflated like balloons, strutting stick figures and anthropomorphic rabbits in sunglasses. They populated an imaginary place called “Magulandia” but were drawn from the essence of Chicano culture. In 2017, Lujan will be the subject of a major retrospective at UCI, curated by Hal Glicksman. This exhibition is part of LA/LA, the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative focusing on the relationship of Los Angeles to Latin American cultures.