Artist Luchita Hurtado’s Sudden Success at 99
Venezeula-born, California-based artist Luchita Hurtado’s success at 99 years old came rather late (she’s been painting since the 1940s) and somewhat unintentionally, but she’s embraced it. For many years, she was known as an artist’s wife (she was married to Austrian surrealist Wolfgang Paalen, then American painter Lee Mullican, with whom she has a son, artist Matt Mullican) and spent “decades cheering them on while quietly creating her own work.” But now her show I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn will be opening at LACMA (16 February) before heading to Mexico City’s Tamayo Museum. Because she had barely shown her work publicly, Hurtado was immensely free to explore her talent, and her style bounces between abstract and portraiture, experimenting with lettering, Navajo-inspired pattern work and more. “I’d forgotten a lot of what I’d done,” she tells The Wall Street Journal. “I didn’t find them interesting at the time, but now I do.” Read more at WSJ.
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