Auto Retrato con Lightning Speak, Contemporary Portrait Painting, Oil on Canvas

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Cruz Ortiz
Auto Retrato con Lightning Speak, Contemporary Portrait Painting, Oil on Canvas
2022

About the Item

A 2022 self portrait by Cruz Ortiz created using oil, wax, and house paint on canvas and measuring 36 inches tall by 32 inches wide. Auto Retrato Con Lightning Speak depicts the artist standing wearing a cowboy hat; a bolt of lightning striking from his mouth and a third eye protruding from his right cheek. Ortiz employs long-established modes, such as portraiture, to institutionalize Tejano culture and figures that have largely been marginalized in art history as well as in American history. In doing so, Ortiz uses painting as a tool for decolonization by focusing on social and political issues in La Frontera (The Texas- Mexico borderlands) to preserve and make visible that colonial efforts have attempted to erase from history. CRUZ ORTIZ—--AMERICAN, Born in Houston, Texas 1972 Cruz Ortiz is an American Contemporary Artist who uses multiple mediums examining historical social political narratives through bold graphic screen prints, figurative abstract portraiture, dream-like landscape paintings, temporal guerrilla installations, printmaking machines, and large scale public art. Ortiz has committed himself to creatively collaborating with cultural arts organizations and social justice organizations for most of his career. He was also a public high school instructor for 15 years, working with diverse urban students. Cruz Ortiz has had solo exhibitions at: ARTPACE in San Antonio, Texas; the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Texas; the University of Texas in Austin; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara, in Santa Barbara, California; and the Judd Foundation, in Marfa, Texas. He has been invited to participate in many major international exhibitions and institutions such as: the Louvre in Paris, France; EV-A in Limerick, Ireland; the traveling exhibition Phantom Sightings with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; the San Juan Triennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico; and at The Blue Coat Museum, in Liverpool, England. His work is in the permanent collections of Ruby City, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the University of Texas at San Antonio Library Special Collections, the Arizona State University Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Currently, Ortiz has been exclusively working on painting as a romantic art historical form of representation. It is through the use of this archaic form that he is taking risks of institutionalizing subject matter. In a time where everything is now digital and virtual, Ortiz is mixing oil paintings and painting from direct observation, while detecting the importance of painting for the future. He is also very interested in how painting pushes the critical contextualization of social political issues, especially in the Texas Mexico Borderlands, or La Frontera, as a method in the decolonization process. His artistic projects aim to center the periphery to capture moments in borderlands history the settler state has tried, over and over, to erase from collective memory. With a great sense of urgency to record, preserve, and disseminate, he paints.

Creator:
Cruz Ortiz (1972, American)
Creation Year:
2022
Dimensions:
Height: 36 in (91.44 cm)Width: 32 in (81.28 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Wax,House Paint,Oil
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
2010-
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Austin, TX
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU1904210190162