Agustín Gonzalez

Gonzalez studied at La Esmeralda University in Mexico (2001-2006). He has received numerous prizes, including three times the FONCA Prize for emerging artists and in 2013 the Zona Maco Prize of the Tequila Foundation. His work is represented in the JUMEX, PAMM Pérez Museum Miami, British Museum, and the State Gallery of Stuttgart Collection.

 Agustín González comes from a younger generation of Mexican artists for whom the distinction between abstraction and figuration has become obsolete. Both forms of expression meet in the impasto paintings by González, which are in the tradition of figurative, magical-mystical Mexican painting. Figural dream images are confronted with geometric color fields and show us in a specific way the possibilities of this lively painting. It pulsates and wobbles in his pictures, between materiality and composition, between richness of detail and reduction. González pursues personal visions in his pictures or he deals with the ideas of writers.

In his latest series, he explores Eduardo Galeano’s thoughts on utopia: “Utopia is in the horizon. I go two steps closer, and it goes two steps further. I walk ten steps and the horizon moves ten steps away. As much as I walk, I will never reach it. Then, what is the use of utopia? For this: to keep on walking.” (Las palabras andantes, 1993)

Some of his small-format works show expressions of these thoughts, figures in front of a night sky, often longingly depicted from behind. In some different works, González uses the tree as a recurring pictorial motif. The bald cypress, called ahuehuete, is given a special meaning in Mexican culture. The name can be translated as “the old man drinks”. For González, this meaning harbors, in addition to autobiographical elements, general associations with roots, origins, and growth, a fertile moment that he traces in his pictures.