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Leavitt and Guerrero first crossed paths in Los Angeles during the 1970s. Leavitt, a native of Washington D.C., graduated from Claremont Graduate Center in 1971 and Guerrero, born and raised just miles from the Mexican border in National City, completed his studies at Chouinard in 1970 (precursor to CalArts). Both artists were heirs to a generation of art makers who mined the regional environment in the formulation of their images. The artists share a willingness to forego pictorial logic in exchange for the disorienting quality of Surrealism in the tradition of Magritte. Additionally both came of age professionally when the banner of conceptual art sanctioned the use of multiple mediums within the artist’s practice.
William Leavitt has devoted the bulk of his fifty year career to deciphering the social indicators innate to the landscape and aesthetics of Southern California. From domestic interiors to decommissioned power stations to SoCal’s ubiquitous Joshua Trees, Leavitt captures the ache of a distinctly urban isolation in conversation with compelling natural beauty. In addition to the painting and drawing featured in this exhibition, Leavitt, a true artworld hybrid, is revered for his work as a draughtsman, designer, installation artist, sculptor, filmmaker and playwright. Though the artist has frequently utilized the innate theatricality of a gallery setting - “My early installations were like fragments of stage sets…sort of like sculptures where I used trees and lights and sound.”
For the past five decades, Raul Guerrero has generated an extraordinarily eloquent variety of artwork inclusive of photography, installation, video, sculpture and most significantly, painting. Leavitt’s selections span a twenty-five year period, from 1994 through 2020. Each reflects Guerrero’s fever dream experience of growing up in a Eurocentric culture, biologically Mexican yet technically American. Utilizing a specific set of formal parameters and a free-wheeling technicolor palette, Guerrero conjures the contradictions of memory in present tense. Tlatilco figurines balance atop a French perfume bottle while an enigmatic stick figure – Madame X of the title – looks on. In a mythic desert panorama, the artist situates Constantin Brancusi’s ‘Sleeping Muse’ in the foreground alongside a trio of indigenous animal species. A cross-cultural mashup is articulated in the ‘close quarters’ of the four object/animals and in the bravura physicality of the paint application. In his forcefully rendered pop culture and fine art objects, Guerrero continues his revelatory examination of identity.
— Marc Selwyn Gallery from their first duo show "Time and Place" (LA 2021); audio by William Leavitt here
— David Kordansky Gallery exhibition link / artist talk video (NY 2024) on Raul Guerrero here
Since the late 1960s, William Leavitt (b.1941, Washington D.C.) was the subject of a retrospective curated by Anne Goldstein and Bennett Simpson at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2011. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Orange County Museum of Art; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. He has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, J. Paul Getty Fellowship, J. Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a United States Artist Fellowship. CV
For over four decades, Raul Guerrero (b. 1945, Brawley, California) has made work informed by his experiences navigating cultures as an American of Mexican ancestry in Southern California. In his paintings, photographs, video, and performance works, Guerrero utilizes language and cultural signifiers to examine notions of place as a way to understand personal concepts of self. An aspect of his work depicts—and critiques—colonial narratives in the Americas such as the settlement of the Great Plains, the history of Latin America, and imposed notions of the American “West.” With compositions fusing Mexican, American, and European visual traditions, he incorporates influences ranging from the readymades of Marcel Duchamp to conceptually-oriented practices associated with a preceding generation of California artists (including John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha) who emerged from Guerrero’s alma mater, the Chouinard Art Institute. A long-time exhibiting artist on the West Coast, Guerrero reflects an intellectually rigorous approach suffused with humor and a deep engagement with legacies of visual art from Southern California and the Southwest.
Raul Guerrero is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Plataforma in Guadalajara, Mexico, on view through January 11, 2026. Other solo exhibitions of his work have taken place at David Kordansky Gallery, New York (2024); Ortuzar Projects, New York (2018); Air de Paris (project space), Romainville, France (2014); Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, San Diego, California (2001, 2007, and 2013); CUE Art Foundation, New York (2010); Long Beach Museum of Art, California (1977); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (1989); and San Francisco Art Institute, California (1977). Recent group exhibitions include 50 Paintings, Milwaukee Art Museum (2023); California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold at the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California (2022–2023), and A Universal History of Infamy, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017–2018). He was the recipient of an NEA Photography Fellowship (1979), the San Diego Art Prize (2006), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (2025). Guerrero lives and works in San Diego. CV
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