Julio Galán’s brilliant career, which spanned from the mid-1980s until his untimely death in 2006, was primarily centered in New York City, Paris, and Monterrey, Mexico. While his work has not been broadly exhibited outside of his native country since his passing, his work was exhibited internationally extensively during his life, and he is widely considered the preeminent Mexican painter of his generation. Galán’s nonconformist and expansive multidisciplinary practice addresses issues of identity, gender, culture, and social constructs in works that layer self-representation and aspects of the personal with larger themes of cultural and sexual difference. Infused with an allegorical quality and woven throughout with a complex array of signifiers—enigmatic iconography and cultural references—his works, as well as his carefully crafted public persona, embraced a self-conscious othering and an ambiguous mutability that refused fixed interpretation.
Julio Galán was born in 1958 in Muzquiz, Mexico, and passed away in 2006. After receiving his degree in architecture at the University of Monterrey, Galán moved to New York City in 1984, where he began to focus exclusively on his art practice, primarily painting. In New York, his contemporaries included Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, among others. Galán’s work was included in the watershed exhibitions Magiciens de la terre at the Center Georges Pompidou, Paris in 1989 and Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century, at Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1993. In 2022 a major presentation of his work, Julio Galán: A Rabbit Cut in Half, was presented at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico along with Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico; and in 2021 his work was in Greater New York 2021, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY. During his lifetime, Galán’s work was exhibited individually and collectively at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2022); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2006); Museo Amparo, Puebla (2001); Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires (1997); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Monterrey (1994); National Gallery Pittsburgh; Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh (1993); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1992); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston (1992); Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (1990); and Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1989), among other institutions; it was also included in biennials such as The Whitney Biennial, New York (1995) and the Havana Biennial, Havana (1983).
For more information, please contact Donald Johnson Montenegro at donald@luhringaugustine.com.
