Catalogues - La Mirada Crítica

La Mirada Crítica

Luis González Palma

Editor: Alasdair Foster
Published: Australian Centre for Photography, 2002

There is a deep sadness and a disquieting peace in the work of Luis González Palma, receiving it's Australian premiere at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney. Many of his images are portraits, close-cropped and large in scale. His subjects are the Mayan Indians of his homeland of Guatemala adorned with symbolic decoration drawn from both indigenous culture and Hispanic Catholicism. For almost his entire life, a civil war was waged in that country. Hundreds of indigenous Mayan villages were razed to the ground, more than 100,000 people died and a million were made refugees. But his are not documentary images of the facts of war, instead they are poetic meditations filled with contrasts and contradictions: beauty and sorrow, mysticism and violence, poetry and pain.

Luis González Palma is an internationally renowned artist. His work featured in last year's Venice Biennale, previously in São Paulo and Havana, and won the Grand Prize at FotoEspaña, Madrid in 1999. He has had major solo shows across North and South America, Europe and Asia including in the Art Institute of Chicago; Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; Royal Festival Hall, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo del Barrio, New York and Ludwig Forum fur International Kunst, Aachen, Germany.

IMAGE © Luis González Palma El pájaro (The Bird) 1989