December 17- February 4, 2023

Reception: December 17, 3-5pm

Carlos Almaraz is considered by many to be the legendary father, or now grandfather, of the LA Chicano Arts movement. Active in Los Four in the early 70s, Almaraz also worked directly with César Chávez and his farm workers’ union, as well as Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino. In his artwork, he developed his own vocabulary of symbols and iconography blended from personal histories, Chicano culture and Mexican and Pre-Columbian traditions. His imagery is magical, shamanistic, dreamlike, and theatrical, with vibrantly colored floating figures, volcanoes, fires, and sexual escapades. Almaraz’s lusciously thick paintings of explosive car crashes embody the Frankenstein aspect of machine and man, while his Monet-like Echo Park paintings are a quintessential LA love story. Before all this, Almaraz travelled to New York City in the mid -sixties, partly because that was the center of the art world. He was confronted with Minimalism, which was antithetical to his fiery palette, but he created his own version of grids, with agitated lines and bold colors. While in NY, he filled dozens of sketchbooks and one of them, sketchbook #53, forms the basis of this exhibition, entitled ¡Fuego! These pastel drawings also mark his early explorations into the complex color harmonies that are now synonymous with his visual language. This is the 10th exhibition of Carlos Almaraz’s work organized by Craig Krull, who worked with the artist in the 1980s at Jan Turner Gallery before Carlos died in 1989. In 2017, Howard Fox curated the major retrospective, Playing with Fire: The Paintings of Carlos Almaraz at LACMA.

Craig Krull Gallery