Abstract

ECKMANN, Teresa. Julio Galán’s Camp-Cursi-Kitsch and Lo Popular: Gender-Expansion and Cultural Inclusion. An. Inst. Investig. Estét [online]. 2022, vol.44, n.121, pp.263-312.  Epub July 31, 2023. ISSN 0185-1276.  https://doi.org/10.22201/iie.18703062e.2022.121.2799.

How did contemporary Mexican artist Julio Galán (b. 1958-d. 2006) engage with lo popular in his artwork, and with what purpose? Galán excelled at post-modern collage, looking to some of the same objects and past cultural and artistic expressions as the Mexican modernists who preceded him by a half-century; through the lens of artifice, he layered fragments from a variety of textual and visual sources, reorienting the language of lo popular as gender-expansive and cultural- ly inclusive. Through self-portraiture, he addressed in his artwork the performance and construction of gendered identity. This analysis draws on the study of scholars Susan Sontag, Francisco de la Maza, and Gerardo Mosquera of the language of “low” art; formal analysis of a select group of Galán’s paintings and sculpture further reveals the variety of sources within lo popular for his imagery, and his Camp-Cursi- Kitsch approach.

Keywords : Contemporary Mexican art; self-portraiture; Mexican painting; popular art; Postmodernism in Art; Neo-Mexicanism; typologies in art.