A Silent Unity of Gazes:
The Photographic Vision of
Luis González Palma

 

October 27, 2009 – January 17, 2010

 

Exhibition catalogue available from the Museum Store

 

Over the past decade, Luis González Palma has become recognized as one of the most influential photographers in

Latin America. The artist employs photo-collage and hand painted warm toned photographic images that are easily identified for their color and mysterious, sometimes theatrical scenes. His innovative visual language is rich in the symbolism of indigenous myth and culture, Catholicism and humanity. González Palma's photographs are marked by visual texture

and symbolism reflective of Latin America's legacy of colonialism, the subjugation of the native cultures of his home country Guatemala and, more recently, the vague complexities of interpersonal relationships. The work has been celebrated

both for its poetry as well as its profound beauty

.

Luis González Palma, who is now based in Argentina, has enjoyed enthusiastic reception from audiences throughout the world and has been the subject of numerous essays and books throughout Latin America, Europe and the US. In the 1999

Arena edition of Luis González Palma’s monograph, Poems of Sorrows, essayist John Wood writes: “His landscape is not that of Guatemala but that of the soul, and it is filled with angels as well as terrifying, mythic beasts. The shadows that pervade it

are cast not from politics but from the sorrows of the human condition. For all the pain in González Palma’s work, he never takes us to those Gates of Hell where, Dante told us, we must abandon all hope. His subject may be grief, but it is not despair.”

 

According to Luis González Palma, “I am trying to show

that the concepts of solitude, pain, and marginality are not

merely problems of the present or past, but are the

conditions of our existence.”

Luis González Palma, Margaret

 

Luis González Palma, Estrategia que Nos Une

(The Strategy that Joins Us)

Luis González Palma, Como un secreto se seduce a si mismo (Like a Secret He Seduces Himself)