The London-based JD Malat Gallery is famous for giving a voice to emerging and well-established talents from all corners of the world, treating its visitors to a diversity of creative expressions. This week, the gallery opened “Cosmic Debris,” a solo exhibition of Horacio Quiroz, which welcomes art lovers into a thought-provoking dialogue about identity and gender.
Horacio Quiroz is not new to JD Malat Gallery; this past summer, he participated in “Here & Now,” a group exhibition that was held at the gallery from June 5 to July 20, 2024. Now, Quiroz is back with eight oil paintings to share his creative means of seeking balance and order amid the contemporary chaos. All works are created in the artist’s signature style of grotesque painting, which nonetheless possesses a unique esthetic appeal and genuine beauty of forms. The exhibition reveals the traces of Mexico City’s vibe and shares the contemporary heartbeat of queer theory and its real-world applications.
Meet Horacio Quiroz
Born in Mexico City in 1977, Horacio Quiroz didn’t receive any formal education in art. He is a self-taught artist who stepped onto the path of painting in 2013, at the age of 36. The artist is widely known for his signature grotesque style that juxtaposes beauty and ugliness within single artistic forms and blends utopian and dystopian elements. These elements are the most pronounced in his best-known paintings, “Deconstructing the Self” and “Morphogenesis,” among others.
The main themes of Quiroz’s art revolve around the fluidity of gender and the multiplicity of identity and creative expressions. For example, his painting “The Internal Fight” depicts a person’s internal emotional and mental struggles, and “Delirious Carnales” visualizes the fluid merging of various human body parts to reflect the intricate connection between mind, spirit, and body.
What’s on Display at the Solo Exhibition of Horacio Quiroz?
The solo exhibition of Horacio Quiroz, which is titled “Cosmic Debris,” presents eight recent works by the artist, each relating to a variety of themes and images in Greek mythology. Quiroz’s grotesque human-like forms constructed of rocks and symbolic elements remind the viewers of the ancient celestial beings and render the fusion of the cosmic and the human in the artist’s creative inquiry.
Horacio Quiroz experiments with human form to undermine the mainstream perceptions of body, gender, and sexuality. His new series welcomes the viewers to contemplate fluid identity and blends ancient Greek myths with contemporary themes to offer a new edge to understanding the timeless aspects of human nature.
“Cosmic Debris” is on view at JD Malat Gallery in London through October 5, 2024.