00:00Show me the works.
00:27I'll give you a sound tour.
00:30We are in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, first of all, at the galleries of Chez Max and Dorothea.
00:42Chez Max and Dorothea is a non-profit foundation based here in LA and in Seillon, southern France.
00:48It's named after the surrealist artists Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning.
00:53The mission of the foundation is to recover the house that they built in the south of France
00:58and turn it into an artist residency research center promoting surrealism and contemporary art.
01:05The house that Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning built is in the south of France in Seillon.
01:10Here in Los Angeles, we have basically an outpost of the foundation to promote the foundation
01:17and to have this gallery space, exhibition space, to promote contemporary artists and as it connects to surrealism.
01:27I co-curated this current exhibition with Bridget Nicole Grice, the director of Chez Max and Dorothea,
01:34so I'm only involved with this particular exhibition.
01:38This exhibition is called Daniela Galois and Benjamin Serrano.
01:44Serrano and Galois were both artists who lived in Tijuana, the border town in north of Mexico, not very far from here,
01:52and they both lived and worked there for their entire lives.
01:56In 1966, Serrano found himself studying in Paris, studying fine art, which is where he met Daniela Galois.
02:04Daniela was born in France, she was French.
02:06They fell in love, she flew to meet him in Tijuana, and the rest is history.
02:11So they were together for some time, eventually they divorced, they separated,
02:16but they stayed close and stayed friends for the rest of their lives.
02:20Daniela never went back to France, she stayed in Tijuana, lived there for the rest of her life,
02:25painting and living there.
02:27So although the artists exhibited during their time,
02:31Serrano certainly reached a little bit more of an exposure in terms of his career in the art world,
02:37Galois a little bit less so.
02:40But the goal of this exhibition is to really highlight their work,
02:44bring it to a broader audience in contemporary art that it hasn't had before.
02:51If you live in Tijuana or San Diego, that border region, they're well known enough there,
02:57but really in other art centers like Mexico City or here in the U.S., their work is not very known.
03:03So one of the main goals of this exhibition is to promote their work, bring it to a broader audience,
03:09and really give it the place that I think it deserves in contemporary art and its ties to 20th century modernism
03:16and postmodern art as well.
03:18Because their work kind of bridges the gap, I think, between modernism, pop art, postmodern work.
03:27They really kind of hybridized a lot of different references in terms of medieval iconography,
03:34in terms of Galois, because she was French and she was influenced by European art.
03:39In terms of Serrano, his references to Mexican folkloric art are really strong.
03:44But they really synchronized all these different references to create this super unique, I think,
03:48very idiosyncratic work that I think could have only happened in a place like Tijuana.
03:53I think there's a reason they never left Tijuana, even though they traveled,
03:57and Serrano was educated in Europe and other parts of Mexico in his art education.
04:04But I think Tijuana always lured them back, or lured him back, and Galois stayed there for the rest of her life.
04:10It wasn't necessarily the best place for them to live, to promote themselves in their career as artists,
04:17but I think as artists it was a very influential and inspirational place to be.
04:24So Tijuana, I think, as a place, is very in the subtext of all of this work for them.
04:31For the curation, I spent a long time meeting with different collectors who own all of this work.
04:38All of this work was really owned by collectors who were either family or close friends of both artists.
04:45And it was a really amazing adventure for me to go through this research process.
04:52I grew up in Tijuana, that's where I'm from, so I was already familiar with these artists.
04:55So I was super excited to bring them to L.A. and have other people enjoy the work as well.
05:02We have one big sculpture here, one big polychrome wood sculpture by Serrano.
05:06He made a lot of wood sculpture in his time.
05:10We have an old carousel slide projector showing some documentation of some of his sculptural work,
05:17but we do have just this one wonderful big wood sculpture by him.
05:22Galois made some sculpture, mostly painting.
05:26I'm pretty happy, I think, with the selection in terms of Galois' work,
05:29because it shows a broad range of her time period and her styles.
05:33She was really, really prolific.
05:35I mean, the friends, family I've talked to about her, she was painting all the time.
05:41She was drinking and painting, drinking and painting.
05:44They both, unfortunately, suffered from pretty debilitating addiction to alcohol.
05:50Serrano only lived to be 49 because of it.
05:55She lived into her 60s, but it was definitely, it was their companion, unfortunately, for their entire lives.
06:04Galois' work is really spread all over Tijuana and San Diego.
06:08She was an icon of Tijuana at the time, I think.
06:13People would see her walking down the streets.
06:15She would be carrying her paintings, her drawings, going kind of door to door, selling her work.
06:20She would literally walk into people's offices or storefronts to sell her work, and everyone knew her.
06:27She was really beloved and well-loved and liked.
06:31For this reason, there's work by Daniela Galois all over Tijuana and San Diego.
06:36I kept knocking on doors in my research process and finding more and more work as I went along.
06:42It was like playing whack-a-mole.
06:44The more I looked, the more I found.
06:47But I'm really happy with the selection.
06:48I think it shows a good range of her work, her different styles, her themes.
06:53And Serrano as well.
06:54There's a little bit less selection of his.
06:56His work is a little bit harder to come by.
06:58He lived a shorter life.
07:01Even though he did produce a lot, it's harder to find his work and bring it.
07:08But I think we have a good selection of Serrano's work as well in terms of showing his art practice,
07:14his variety of styles and mediums and topics.
07:18The goal was to bring them together.
07:22They did show together during their time when they were alive.
07:25They even collaborated a little bit.
07:26They made some sculpture work together.
07:29But in a somewhat romantic sense, we wanted to bring them together and show them together as artists and as people.
07:39There's a nice tie to the foundation itself because the foundation is named after Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning,
07:45who were a surrealist couple.
07:47We thought it would be a nice gesture to bring them here to this space and to this foundation.
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