Luchita Hurtado

This compact volume, with beautifully printed black-and-white and color illustrations, is an intimate survey of the life and career of Venezuelan American artist Luchita Hurtado (1920–2020), filled with stories and photos from Hurtado’s personal archive and with reproductions of her paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints. Her distinctive approach to self-portraiture depicted the human body as landscape, and indeed, many of her works merged figuration and abstraction. Drawings of plants and flowers are reproduced here on transparent vellum paper. The text, filled with stories of Hurtado’s many friendships with artists from the 1930s through the early 21st century, is an extended Q&A by curator, critic, and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist (artistic director, Serpentine Galleries, London). Not a retrospective but almost a love letter of a sort, this work introduces readers to a too-little-known artist, whose career spanned 80 years across artistic communities in Mexico, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Taos, NM.