Artist Lari Pittman Opens Stirring Solo Show at Mexico City’s Museo Jumex

“I wanted to create a painting that projects an outside of that cultural insistence that artists are always like a thermometer and are supposed to do the heavy lifting of cultural responses. I wanted to divest myself of that mandate. Here,” he says, gesturing to Sparkling City, a dense urban fantasy of intricately adorned towers and skyscrapers, behind him, “is my insistence that the city sparkle.” He turns to the swelling crowd. “How do you say twilight in Spanish?”

On view now through February 23, “Lo que se ve, se pregunta” (What You See, You Wonder), Pittman’s first retrospective in Latin America, looks back at the past 40 years of the artist’s work with some of his most well-known paintings, drawings, sculptures, and artist books, curated by Connie Butler of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, who also organized Pittman’s 2019 Hammer exhibition “Declaration of Independence.” Layering visual references to Mexican and Latin American craft traditions, Latin American magical realism, the AIDS crisis and punk and feminist movements of the ’80s and ’90s, the contentious and shifting parameters of citizenship, and, curiously, owls—a signature surrogate that often appears in Pittman’s work—the works obliquely address many of the strongest political currents of the past generations.

While a student at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), he was a close ally of the school’s Feminist Art Program, though he wasn’t allowed to formally join. His proximity to the program offered a path out of the school’s conceptualist traditions and he began integrating domestic and decorative arts into his own work. His more recent “Portraits of Textiles” and “Portraits of Humans” series (beginning in 2018) display a material knowledge of ornament by weaving quilting, textiles, wallpaper, and Mexican retablo, or altar, paintings into his tableaux, as well as intimacies from his own home.

His images also draw on art-historical painting traditions, visually referencing the work of other artists such as the Mexican painter Hermenegildo Bustos (1832–1907). Pittman’s 1989–90 series “Beloved and Despised” first presents his queer identity and interpretations of gender. The collaged paintings feature Victorian-era silhouettes, forms that carry a deeply classist and problematic subtext; bold graphics, such as neon-colored arrows, and more traditional florals and landscapes. The “Once a Noun, Now a Verb” series (1997–98) has non-gendered egg figures navigating masculinity and machismo, recalling Diego Rivera’s murals in Mexico City’s Palacio Nacional with their characters’ labyrinth struggles and journeys. Even though decades old, they, just like the endless Sparkling City, offer a map to another, more incredible realm.