LUCHITA HURTADO: FIGURES AND ICONS ANNENBERG COMMUNITY BEACH HOUSE NOVEMBER 16, 2017 – JANUARY 4, 2018 415 PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY, SANTA MONICA, CA 90402

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Annenberg Community Beach House is pleased to present "Luchita Hurtado: Figures and Icons," an exhibition of historical works spanning from the 1940s until the 1990s by the -born and Santa Monica-based artist. The show features a number of figurative works, including self-portraits cast in multiple styles and lights by Hurtado (b. 1920), and a number of works featuring iconographic imagery that has recurred throughout the artist's oeuvre.

Hurtado's figurative works maintain sinewy lines that alternate between bold, dashing, and quick strokes, to more ambiguous and etched contours of otherworldly subjects, and also of her self. The artist’s pictures interweave the primordial and ancient with the spiritual and otherworldly, generating a distinctive and fluid mysticism that characterizes Hurtado's output. There are a number of works in the exhibition that reflect her non-dichotomous ideas about nature’s relationship to the body, such as the landscape painting that doubles as a self-portrait from 1981. Throughout her life Hurtado has developed this through compositional unions between figuration and abstraction that are distinctly her own. This and other works bespeak the artist’s concerns about the environment, within which humanity’s, and the human body’s, relationship to nature and landscape is inextricable, with one feeding into the other and with no separation between the two.

An even more surprising element in the artist's repertoire is her focus on depicting “icons” as a form of language. Since early on in life, the artist has always surrounded herself with ancient, religious, and spiritual imagery, which appear in her artworks hieroglyph-like. Her reliance on and depiction of such iconography speaks to Hurtado’s Surrealist tendencies towards symbolism as a means of communication. This body of work features animals, classical and Biblical imagery, symbols, text, and other bold forms, reflecting a private language and world developed by the artist throughout her life.

The works in the exhibition overall are very personal, contextualizing the artist as always looking, and in that regard always working to expand her world, whether in her own home for many years on Mesa Road in Santa Monica canyon; in Taos, New , where she spent much of her time in the 1970s; or in the studio.

This exhibition was developed by Luchita Hurtado with the assistance of Ryan Good and Paul Soto. Special thanks to the Mullican family, Robin Mitchell, Cole Root, and Brenna Ivanhoe. All works courtesy of the artist and Park View/Paul Soto, .