ENRIQUE CHAGOYA: BIG AND LITTLE DRAWINGS
May 20 – July 2, 2004
During May and June, George Adams Gallery will present an exhibition of new works on paper by Enrique Chagoya. The exhibition will include a series of pen and ink drawings inspired by Philip Guston’s “Poor Richard” series as well as six large-scale charcoal and pastel drawings and a new amate paper “codex.” This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Continuing to combine Meso-American iconography, art historical references and pop culture imagery, Enrique Chagoya’s new work explores the representation of history and boldly comments on the current global political climate. Six new charcoal drawings mounted on canvas, ranging from 60 x 60 inches to 60 x 80 inches, stylistically recall an earlier series of work Chagoya first exhibited in New York at the Alternative Museum in 1989. Similarly, these new drawings are based on editorial cartoons reinterpreted into billboard size compositions that include both popular imagery and personalities from the political realm. For example, one drawing rendered in black charcoal and red pastel depicts Alice in Wonderland holding a pink flamingo as the bird gently stops a charging military helicopter piloted by Jesus. In a companion piece, George W. Bush appears with members of his administration and other political figures as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Another work shows a band of dinosaurs as they wreak havoc inside a modern suburban home with the word liberty stenciled in reverse at the bottom of the composition.
Also included in the exhibition is a series of twelve red and black ink drawings entitled “Poor George (After P.G.).” Overtly political, the drawings quote Philip Guston’s 1971 caricatures of Richard Nixon albeit replacing Nixon with the figure of George W. Bush. In the drawing “Poor George (After P.G. #3),” for example, Chagoya depicts President Bush holding a doll-like Condoleeza Rice as they pose for a photograph, and in “Poor George (After PG) #4” Vice-President Dick Cheney in the guise of a cone-head gingerly peers into the head of a long-nosed President Bush. Chagoya’s appropriation of Guston’s “Poor Richard” series deftly fuses art and politics while raising the question, “is history simply repeating itself?”
In addition, Chagoya has also produced a new “codex” based on Pre-Columbian books. Chagoya’s codices, which are read from right to left, subvert familiar historical narratives by generating invented histories through a cross-pollination of drawn and painted images and collaged elements.
Born in Mexico City in 1953, Enrique Chagoya has lived in the United States since 1978. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1984 and his MFA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1987. Chagoya’s work has been widely exhibited and is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, LA County Museum, and the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., among others. He currently resides in San Francisco, CA and is Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford University.
Enrique Chagoya: Big and Little Drawings will be on view through July 2nd. The gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday, 10am–6pm, Mondays by appointment. Summer hours, beginning June 1st will be Monday – Friday, 10am-5:30pm. Images can be viewed on the gallery's website at www.artnet.com/gadams.html and on the Art Dealers Association website, www.artdealers.org.
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS July – August: Joan Brown: Cardboard Constructions from the Early 1970s
