Luchita Hurtado
Yo Soy
29 June – 5 October
Downtown Los Angeles
Opening Reception
29 June 2025
7 – 9 pm
Dates
29 June – 5 October 2025
‘I did many self-portraits. And then at one point I decided I would use letters, and I did…I started with a portrait that said, ‘I am.’ And I decided that was as much me as my real face and figure.’
—Luchita Hurtado
Over the course of her eight-decade career, Venezuelan-born, Los Angeles-based artist Luchita Hurtado (1920 – 2020) committed to a lifelong journey of personal and artistic evolution defined by ceaseless experimentation. The first exhibition devoted to the artist at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, ‘Yo Soy’ (I Am) will bring together paintings and drawings from a pivotal moment in Hurtado’s career: Inspired by the surge of feminist activism in LA, the artist held her first solo exhibition at the Woman’s Building in February 1974, debuting her Linear Language series of expressive, geometric word paintings. A half century on, ‘Yo Soy’ revisits that landmark presentation and includes never-before-seen works from the series it introduced. Through her vibrant, abstract canvases—some cut up and meticulously resewn—visitors will be able to experience the depth of Hurtado’s exploration of pattern, mysticism, the earth and the cosmos.
The 1970s were a period of intense productivity for Hurtado. Living in Santa Monica Canyon with her own studio and her children now grown, she found herself at the heart of a burgeoning women’s movement in Los Angeles, a collective awakening that profoundly shaped her artistic identity. As an original member of the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, Hurtado later cited a seminal meeting of local women artists in 1971, organized by Joyce Kozloff, as a turning point in both her artistry and activism. There, Hurtado introduced herself to the group using her married name, ‘Mullican.’ Her friend, the printmaker June Wayne, interjected: ‘Luchita what?’ The prompt led the artist to reintroduce herself as ‘Luchita Hurtado.’
This fabled account of self-renaming laid the foundation for her Linear Language series, which began with a self-portrait featuring only the abstracted word ‘Yo.’ Hurtado created the subsequent works in this series between 1972 and 1974, in a process that relied upon speed of action in merging language with graphic patterns and textiles. Describing the technical innovations her series inspired, the artist explained:
‘To achieve quickness, the evenness and length of stroke I needed on large canvasses, I rigged up bottles with nozzles that became the brushes I needed. […] I painted large paintings, all messages, some right side up, some on their side, some cut, set apart, as life does, and sewed together again. Some were in layers, one atop the other.’
Among works on view in the exhibition is ‘Self Portrait’ (1973), in which bold red, yellow, black and silver lines traverse every direction within sewn panels of varying sizes. Beneath the work’s intricate design lies the words—‘I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn’—that four decades later would serve as the inspiration for Hurtado’s 2019 retrospective at the Serpentine Galleries. In another piece on view from the original Woman’s Building exhibition, deep blue and purple patchwork obscures the title ‘Earth & Sky Interjected’ (1973)—a work that likewise provided the title for a later exhibition, Hurtado’s 2024 – 2025 survey at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico.
Artworks
Installation Views
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LUCHITA HURTADO, ARTIST STATEMENT, CA. 1976
'From the beginning, painting has been a most integral part of my life. I make clothes, I cook meals, I've raised children. I write poetry and I keep a journal of my dreams as well as my days, but most important, I paint and consider myself a painter. An artist's recesses become a condition, a preparation to transmit a commitment to one's self.'
FROM THE ARCHIVES OF THE ESTATE OF LUCHITA HURTADO
‘Yo Soy’ also will present a selection from the archives of The Estate of Luchita Hurtado, including original exhibition and artwork documentation, along with ephemera from organizations such as the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, Womanspace and the Woman’s Building.
Young creatives from Las Fotos Project read Luchita Hurtado's artist statement in both English and Spanish, written by the artist in the late 1970s. A Learning program in collaboration with The Estate of Luchita Hurtado and Las Fotos Project, this video was made in response to 'Luchita Hurtado. Yo Soy.'
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About the Artist
Luchita Hurtado
Born in Maiquetía, Venezuela, in 1920, Luchita Hurtado dedicated over eighty years of her extensive oeuvre to the investigation of universality and transcendence. Developing her artistic vocabulary through a coalescence of abstraction, mysticism, corporality and landscape, the breadth of her experimentation with unconventional techniques, materials and styles speak to the multicultural and experiential contexts that shaped her life and career. Hurtado emigrated to the United States in 1928, settling in New York where she attended classes at the Art Students League. She relocated to Mexico City in the late 1940s and then moved to San Francisco Bay in the following decade. Eventually, Hurtado settled in Santa Monica, California and frequently visited her second home in Taos, New Mexico.
Although she associated with a vast network of internationally renowned artists and intellectuals, including members of the Dynaton, the Mexican muralists, and the Surrealists, Hurtado’s practice had always remained an independent pursuit. Her body of work cohered through an examination of self-affirmation, introduced in her early period from the 1940s to the 1960s. This output was defined by surrealist figuration, biomorphism and geometric abstraction, executed in brightly hued palettes with striking expressive range. Hurtado’s work continued to evolve throughout the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrating a fluid shift towards representative figuration that led to a production of contemplative self-portraits known as her ‘I Am’ paintings. Asserting her presence through a personal perspective of the body—rendered from above at skewed angles—Hurtado coalesced the viewer’s gaze with hers, utilizing the unexpected position of the floor as a backdrop and juxtaposing soft corporeal lines against the hard-edge geometric patterns of the environments beneath her. This series was followed by a group of surrealist ‘Body Landscapes’, in which human figures assume the form of mountains and desert sand dunes, as well as Hurtado’s late 1970s ‘Sky Skin’ series, where feathers weightlessly float in bright blue skies. The works from this period were informed by Hurtado’s newly reinforced feminist ideals and involvement with the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists. Many members of this group would later form the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, where the Hurtado’s first solo exhibition was hosted in 1974.
In more recent years, Hurtado continued to explore themes of language and nature with her work, focusing on the planet, natural elements, and the environment in recognition of the urgency of the ecological crisis. These works function as symbolic proxies and intimate meditations on the Earth as mystic progenitor, underscoring the interconnectedness between corporeality and the natural world.
In 2019, Hurtado was listed in TIME 100’s most influential people and received the Americans for the Arts Carolyn Clark Powers Lifetime Achievement Award. Hurtado’s first solo museum exhibition, ‘I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn,’ opened at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London in 2019 when the artist was 98 years old. The exhibition then travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in February 2020.
Current Exhibitions
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