JORGE GALINDO
RAWHIDE CHOPSUEY
January 15 – February 11, 2022
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present RAWHIDE CHOPSUEY, an exhibition of new works by Spanish artist Jorge Galindo. This show focuses on the artist’s ongoing series of large multimedia paintings that feature representations of flora ranging from the expressionistic and abstracted to the mass-printed and decorative. RAWHIDE CHOPSUEY, which builds on a visual language Galindo has developed throughout his decades-long career, is the artist’s first solo show in Los Angeles, and will run from January 15 through February 11, 2022.
Galindo is one of the foremost Spanish painters of his generation, having studied under Julian Schnabel in the workshops of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. After establishing a practice in collage and photomontage early in his career, the artist developed his adroit painterly style. Galindo’s large-scale canvases are marked by an aesthetic resistance to clear legibility, featuring layers of bold, expressive brushstrokes, fine lines, paint splatters, footprints, and decontextualized collaged materials. His aptitude for pictorial extravagance and lush, sensual frenzy gives the still life, a genre that has so often prioritized the still, tranquil, and delicate, a renewed vision.
The works in the exhibition were all produced during 2021, a year which saw in Galindo’s practice not only prominent collaborations with Julian Schnabel and Pedro Almodóvar, but also a deep exploration of painting and collage unique in its fusion of old wallpaper with floral painted imagery.
Amidst Galindo’s vehement gestures dominated by the carnal color scheme of red, pink, and ochre, glimmers of figurative recognition appear – most frequently, of flowers. Galindo presents us with unreal depictions of these plants, which are as beautiful as they are recycled and full of metaphoric potential. In most canvases, the artist first photomontages patterned depictions of flowers, recalling a practice popularized by Pop artists. Galindo sometimes plays with features of kitsch in an effort to turn a fixed entity, like a rose, into something more dreamlike and surprising, uncanny in its recycled familiarity. Despite his practice’s proximity to Pop, Galindo’s focus is not on irony and simulations, but rather on the sensuality of paint, as the Action painters were. In fact, in order to achieve such large-scale abstractions, he will often stand around, even on top of, the canvas, harnessing the full kinetic potential of his body in the process.
According to the artist, the works in RAWHIDE CHOPSUEY “convey a sense of tempered violence, or a violent temperance.” The tension between the forceful and the withheld operates on both a formal and a conceptual level. Galindo’s use of floral vintage wallpapers, pulled from a myriad of 20th century styles, provide imperfect frames for his expressionistic painted bouquets, which seem to hover atop the canvas’ surfaces like still-frames of floral arrangements mid-explosion. “Ultimately, a rhetoric of freedom in which the gesture on the two-dimensional surface celebrates the pleasure of being bodily in the world.”
Galindo (b. 1965, Spain; lives and works in Toledo) currently has a two-person exhibition with acclaimed filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar at the Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Germany, part of a long-standing collaboration between the two artists. Galindo’s work has been exhibited internationally, at institutions including the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. His collection placements include Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Museo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres; Museo Marugame Hirai, Japan; ING Belgium Collection, Brussels; Hall Art Foundation, Germany; among many others.