Hauser & Wirth, Downtown Los Angeles
On view through October 5^th, 2025

by Cathy Breslaw

“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

In 2019, at the age of 99 years, Luchita Hurtado was named one of Time Magazine’s 100’s most influential people and received the Americans for the Arts Carolyn Clark Powers Lifetime Achievement Award. And, in that same year she had her first solo museum exhibition, introduced first with an opening at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London and then on to the LA County Museum of Art in 2020. Hurtado died that same year having previously been best known as artist Lee Mullican’s wife, with whom she had a long and happy marriage.

Born outside of Caracus, Venezuela, Hurtado was 8 years old when she emigrated to the United States (1928) and spent most of the second half of her life between Santa Monica and Taos, New Mexico. While she was a prolific artist throughout her lifetime, she did not pursue a professional art career. Her work came into view only after 1998 when Ryan Good, the studio director for Mullican’s estate found Hurtado’s sizeable collection of drawings and paintings tucked away in storage. Perhaps her anonymity gave her the freedom of expression in moving unselfconsciously  from figurative abstraction to surrealism to geometric abstraction, and between themes of motherhood, mysticism, spirit, and self-portraits using the body as landscape and geometric patterns reminiscent of native textiles.

The Hauser & Wirth exhibition Yo Soy (I am) is a collection of richly colored patterned works created in the 1970s, some of which have never previously been shown. These sewn-together geometries include ‘secret messages’, with embedded words painted into the works. She explained her painting process:

‘To achieve quickness, the evenness and length of stroke I needed on large canvasses, I rigged up bottles with nozzles that became brushes I needed…I painted large paintings, all messages, some right side up, some on the their side, some cut, set apart, as life does, and sewed together again. Some were in layers, one atop one another.’

It is important to understand the context within which this collection of works was created as it was a highly influential period of Hurtado’s life, expanding the scope of her art practice. The 1970’s during which Hurtado created these works was an important time not only for her productivity but it also coincided with a pivotal period for the growth of the women’s movement. She joined a local group of women artists who were married to well known male artists, meeting to discuss education for women in the arts, and to create feminist projects in Los Angeles. Inspired by these informal meetings, Hurtado organized the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists (LACWA) who included among them artists Alexis Smith, Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Vija Celmins and Avilda Moses. This 1970’s group organized events to call attention to the lack of women artists represented in galleries and museums echoing the greater conversation about feminism burgeoning throughout the United States.

The works shown in this Hauser & Wirth exhibition, were inspired by her association with LACWA whose members encouraged Hurtado toward her first solo exhibition of these Yo Soy works held at the Woman’s Building in the Grandview One gallery in 1974. Known as her Linear Language series, this group of paintings were created by cutting the painted words into strips and then reorganizing and sewing the strips into patterned formations to make abstracted patterns stretched over a wooden frame. The painted words of ‘messages’ are not easy to decipher. Among works on view in the exhibition is Self-Portrait (1973), with bold red, yellow, black and silver lines across various directions within sewn panels of varying sizes. Within the pattern are the words ‘I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn’. This painting would four decades later be the impetus for Hurtado’s 2019 exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries. Another work previously shown in the Woman’s Building exhibition, with deep blues and purples, holds the title Earth & Sky Interjected (1973) that provided the title for her recent exhibition (2024-25) at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico. Another painting of yellows, oranges and light brown geometries is formed into a corner connecting two walls entitled Couple With Offsprings(1973). It is a family portrait containing the words woman,man, child child which represented herself, her husband and two sons.

Hurtado’s expressive colorful geometric word paintings, including the series of black and white works, are a beautiful example of only one style of painting that she created during the course of her eight decade career. She considered these works to be as equal an iteration of a self-portrait as her figurative work. Over the course of her art-making, Hurtado’s practice was punctuated with experimentation and portray the influence of many styles and movements of her generation – mid-twentieth century abstraction, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. While an influential member of the international artists’ community for more than half a century, her prominence as a visual artist only came a few years before the end of her life and continues to grow over time. The series of works exhibited at Hauser & Wirth places Hurtado’s work within an important decade of her career as well as the cultural influence of the womans’ movement from which she was influenced.

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