Roberto Gil de Montes & Joey Terrill: Future Dialogues

Free with RSVP here.

On the occasion of Roberto Gil de Montes’s upcoming solo exhibition, Reverence in Blue, at kurimanzutto New York, the gallery presents a live in-conversation between artists Roberto Gil de Montes and Joey Terrill. Together, the pair will discuss their involvement in the Chicano art movement in which both took part in during the 1970s and 1980s in East Lost Angeles, as well as within the queer communities they were attached to during this period and how it affected their respective practices.

The conversation is the fifth chapter of the FUTURE DIALOGUES series hosted by kurimanzutto and Casa Dragones. Inspired by kurimanzutto’s intergenerational program defined by a rich history of artistic collaborations and Casa Dragones’s dynamic tradition of exploration and inquiry, FUTURE DIALOGUES focuses on the exchange of knowledge and ideas for the artists and creatives of tomorrow.

The series, launched in April 2023, has featured pioneering artists: Minerva Cuevas and Alfredo Jaar, Abraham Cruzvillegas and Julie Mehretu, Carlos Amorales and Joan Jonas, and Bárbara Sánchez-Kane and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

About the artists:

Roberto Gil de Montes (b. 1950, Guadalajara, Mexico). Irreverent and serious, purposeful and inconclusive, his paintings explore the hidden images and forgotten or imagined stories of the exuberant everyday life that he sees.

As a teenager his family relocated to the United States where he later went on to receive a BFA and MFA from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. As a young artist he became involved in the Chicano art movement in and around Los Angeles, developing relationships with artists such as Carlos Almaraz. In the 1980s, he returned to Mexico City where he worked at the Museo de Arte Moderno and on Artes Visuales, the prestigious arts journal that explored visual culture in Latin America. Roberto returned to Los Angeles to concentrate on his painting practice and began to exhibit widely. He also became involved in the creation of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and began to show with Jan Baum Gallery, one of the few galleries at that time to show Black, Latinx and Asian artists on the West Coast. In 2000, he and his partner, Eddie, packed up their home in Echo Park and moved, via San Francisco, to La Peñita, a fishing town on the Pacific coast of Nayarit, Mexico, where they had spent many holidays. Roberto continues to live in La Peñita and paints in a studio directly overlooking the town plaza, a block from the coast.

Joey Terrill (b. 1955, Los Angeles, California) joins diverse mediums of zine-making, performance and painting in a body of work that tenderly encompasses his intimate experiences of intersecting queer, Chicano and artistic communities. Drawing from the existing visual culture surrounding him, Terrill combines personal photographs, found pop cultural imagery and reproductions of artworks by queer predecessors to conjure utopian landscapes. While Terrill’s early work captures intimacies between friends and lovers at the start of the AIDS crisis in his characteristic flat style, his later paintings trace developments in photorealism and Conceptual art, reflecting the artist’s discursive relationship to illusionistic space.

Terrill currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California, as Director of Community Partnerships for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.