Date/Time
Date(s) - October 9, 2021 - April 10, 2022
10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Location
Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, University Center for the Arts
Curated by Álvaro Ibarra
gloriosería n.
[sp., conflation of gloria (glory), and grosería (a vulgarity)]: an exalted vulgarity
“Gloriosería is a made-up word that conflates an enthusiasm for sensation with a fascination for the vulgar and the horrific. Viewers will find the artwork featured in Glorioserías both familiar and alien. The eleven artists in the exhibition display uniquely personal distillations of grotesque realism, intimate battles that nevertheless intersect with broader existential perils present in modern-day México.” —exhibition curator Álvaro Ibarra
The expression gloriosería reflects how modern Mexican artists have grappled with grotesque realism—an artistic genre that brutalizes, exaggerates, and glorifies the bodily form—as a subversive method for negotiating personal and cultural identity, for presenting social critiques (especially of historical disenfranchisement under colonialism), and for offering new perceptions of fundamental humanity.
The works in this exhibition are drawn from the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art’s permanent collection and from the private collection of Dale Pruce and Leslie Walker.
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Enrique Chagoya
Mexican (b. 1953)
Enrique Chagoya holds an MFA from UC Berkeley and is a Full Professor of Art in the Stanford Department of Art and Art History. His work is inspired by his experiences living in Europe and on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border and in Linda maestra!, Chagoya pulls from Francisco Goya’s Capricho No. 68 of the same name to caution against political witch hunts in contemporary politics.
José Luis Cuevas
Mexican (1934-2017)
José Luis Cuevas was born in Mexico City in 1934 and worked as an engraver, illustrator, painter, and printmaker. Works like La jarro and Justine y el Marquez de Sade draw from the artist’s contemporary obsession with the writings of the Marquis de Sade in a surrealist, poststructuralist heroism of the French nobleman.
David Alfaro Siqueiros
Mexican (1896-1974)
David Alfaro Siquieros was a twentieth century social realist painter whose work centered him as one of the most famous of the “Mexican muralists.” Siquieros also illustrated poems, as in Canto General 9—a lithograph that conflates the land and the people into a tenebrous composition and thereby reflects the state of the U.S. in 1968.
Rufino Tamayo
Mexican (1899-1991)
Rufino del Carmen Arellanes Tamayo was born in Oaxaca de Juárez in 1899. Through the latter half of the twentieth century, Tamayo created a new and universal modality for Mexican painting that transcended nationalistic concerns. His style incorporated figurative abstraction with surrealism and appealed to a universal audience concerned with both the cosmic and the existential.
Álvaro Ibarra, exhibition curator
Álvaro Ibarra (M.A. and Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is a Temporary Assistant Professor at Utah State University whose primary area of expertise is in the art, architecture, and archaeology of ancient Greece and Rome. His research considers the mechanisms for embracing and/or rejecting Rome in the provinces. As a field archaeologist, Ibarra has worked all over the ancient Roman world, including Pompeii. His secondary interests include modern through contemporary art from Latin America, with a concentration on Mexican, Chicano, and Latina/o/x.
Join us for a Curator Lecture by Álvaro Ibarra on Thursday, October 28 at 5:30 p.m. in the museum. The program will be followed by a reception sponsored by Hixon Interiors.
Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by the City of Fort Collins Fort Fund, the FUNd Endowment at CSU, and Colorado Creative Industries. CCI and its activities are made possible through an annual appropriation from the Colorado General Assembly and federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This exhibition is also made possible in part through a grant from the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment. This fund works to enhance the cultural development and atmosphere for the arts at Colorado State University and benefits from the generous support of all those who love the arts.
