Luis Jiménez: American Dream

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Luis Jiménez: American Dream, the next exhibition in his galleries at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. The exhibition includes eighteen sculptures, paintings, and drawings made between 1968 and 1997. It is the first one-person exhibition of Jiménez’s work in Los Angeles in more than forty years.

Luis Jiménez (1940–2006) is best known for his large-scale fiberglass sculptures marked by their dazzling, high-key colors, slick surfaces, and gravity-defying compositions. His earlier work has sometimes been associated with Pop art, while his later work has long been praised by critics for his unique artistic vision inspired by his Mexican heritage and his home in the American Southwest. As Lucy Lippard has written, “Like lava, the gleaming bulk of his work seems caught in the act of flowing, like time or history itself, embodying an exuberance and even excess that is most certainly foreign to postmodern art.”

For Jiménez, everyday objects and ordinary life were the catalyst for his work: “If I was an outsider looking at America—what would I see? It would be the motorcycle, the automobile; this is the important visible iconography of America.” Sculptures such as American Dream, in which a female nude merges with a Volkswagen Beetle, and Cycle (El Filo), where a rider becomes one with his motorcycle, both from 1969, stem from the artist’s fascination with these motifs. They were inspired both by his childhood hobby of repairing old cars, where he learned to use fiberglass, and the thriving Pop art scene he encountered while living in New York in the 1960s. These sculptures, together with Bomb (1968)—an over-six-foot-tall sculpture of a blonde “bombshell” as a voluptuous mushroom cloud— probe the human/machine relationship and build upon images of modernization crafted by the Mexican muralists.

The cowboy is another central figure of American culture that Jiménez redefines in his work. In Rodeo Queen (1972), Vaquero (1978), and several Mustang drawings, Jiménez pays homage to this icon of the American West while retelling the story of its origins: “The cowboy was a Mexican invention. It wasn’t John Wayne who was the original cowboy. That’s the myth.” In his Honky Tonk (c. 1981) drawings, a series of life-size figure drawings of his friends dancing at a bar, Jiménez elaborates on this iconography taken from life in the American West. As one critic described, “Jiménez’s work creates a world where raucousness and pathos hold equal sway, where pointed social commentary coexists with a feel for the heroic dimension of everyday lives.”

Luis Jiménez was born in El Paso, Texas. After studying in Mexico City in the mid-1960s, Jiménez lived in New York from 1966 to 1969, before settling in New Mexico, where he lived for the remainder of his life. In 2006, he died in a tragic accident while working in his studio. His work was included in the 1973 and 1991 Whitney Biennials, and has been exhibited at numerous museums across the United States, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, New Museum in New York, and the San Francsico Museum of Modern Art. One person exhibitions include the Albuquerque Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. Most recently, the retrospective “Border Vision: Luis‘s Southwest” was presented by the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin in 2021.