Hugo Crosthwaite

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce HUGO CROSTHWAITE: TIJUAS! (Death March, Tijuana Bibles and Other Legends), on view from November 9 through December 21, 2019. This will be the artist's fourth solo exhibition with the Gallery. An Artist's Reception will be held on Saturday, November 9th from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Hugo Crosthwaite has spent much of his adult life working on both sides of the U.S. and Mexico border, observing and documenting the extraordinary ebb and flow of humanity that makes this region one of the most existentially dynamic places on the North American continent. In Tijuas!, Crosthwaite will present selections from several bodies of work that continue his exploration of this ever-evolving culture, among them the Tijuana Bibles, a new series of animated videos and books, recent graphite-and-ink on canvas and panel paintings, new Tijuanerias ink drawings, and Death March, a phenomenal and monumental work that preceded his celebrated performative murals. This will be the first time this work will be presented since it was commissioned in 2010 for Morbid Curiosity: The Richard Harris Collection at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Concurrently, Crosthwaite's work will be included in The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today, a major exhibition premiering at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, October 26, 2019 through August 30, 2020. The exhibit will present works by nearly 50 finalists, including seven artists shortlisted for prizes. As the first-prize winner, Crosthwaite will receive a cash award of $25,000 and a commission to create a portrait of a notable living person for the museum's permanent collection. The winner of the 2016 triennial exhibition was Amy Sherald.

Hugo Crosthwaite was born 1971 in Tijuana, Mexico and graduated from San Diego State University in 1997 with a BA in Applied Arts. Crosthwaite lives and works in San Diego, CA and Rosarito, Mexico. His works are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; San Diego Museum of Art, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL, UA Art Gallery, Little Rock, AK; and numerous private collections around the world.

Hugo Crosthwaite's La Güera, 2018, is featured in the "Readings" section of Harper's Magazine in print in January 2020.

I have never before seen an artist who can sidle right up to Goya’s Caprichos or Desastres de La Guerra and not only survive the comparison but generate mutual enrichment. Hugo Crosthwaite’s TIJUAS! (Death March, Tijuana Bibles, and Other Legends) at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents a breathtaking collection of drawings ranging from small to mural-size, as well as video animations and books, all made over a period of over a decade. Crosthwaite’s work addresses life on both sides of the US–Mexican border where he conveys the feeling of life bottled up beneath a merciless cork, his observations packed with violence, tenderness, pain, boredom, and his mind-boggling draftsmanship. —Daniel Gerwin

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., named Hugo Crosthwaite the 2019 winner of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, an astute selection for several reasons. Crosthwaite’s entry, a meditative, three-minute stop-motion animation about a woman migrating from Mexico to the United States, stretched the conventional bounds of portraiture and affirmed the genre’s relevance, both of which are aims of the prize. Over nearly two decades, Crosthwaite has applied portraiture’s concentrated attention not only to individuals but even more avidly to place.

The new exhibition at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles by Mexican-American artist Hugo Crosthwaite (b. 1971) grabs your attention the moment you walk into the gallery. The artist, who lives and works in San Diego and Rosarito, Mexico, created a monumental, 27-foot wide multi-panel work called Death March. Multiple human figures and skeletons compose a funeral march, appearing to honor the deceased in a manner that calls to mind Día de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead.

The painter is showing a new series of drawings, panel paintings and animations that chart the ebb and flow of humanity, along with unseen magical phenomena, in the U.S.-Mexico-border region where he lives and works. (The artist divides his time between Rosarito and San Diego.) Crosthwaite, a painter whose work is as influenced by comic books as it is by Gustav Doré, recentlywon the top prize in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwi Boocheyer Portrait Competion, pays tributes to Goya’s Caprichos. A recent series capturing grotesqueries and folly.

For painter and video artist Hugo Crosthwaite, life has unfolded in equal parts on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and he has come to understand that in a way the border region itself is its own nation, with a unique culture that is both blended and divided, and a population comfortable with dualities. Both his films and graphite and ink drawings on canvas—often at monumental scale—exist in a black-and-white palette and are rich with regal, stylized detail.

TIJUAS! (Death March, Tijuana Bibles, and Other Legends)

November 9, 2019 - January 4, 2020

Press Release