Luchita Hurtado

Over the course of her long and rich life, Venezuelan-born American painter Luchita Hurtado created a stunning body of work that only received the widespread attention it deserves toward the end of her life. In her paintings, Hurtado moved seamlessly between modernism and Surrealism, taking inspiration from South American weavings and her passion for environmentalism.

This handsome volume celebrates Hurtado’s life and work in her own words through a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, along with an abundance of never-before-seen photographs and artworks, such as self-portraits and erotic drawings. Along the way we learn of her early life in New York City, her emergence as a painter, her life with her husbands Daniel de Solar, Wolfgang Paalen and Lee Mullican, and a whole cast of artists from Leonora Carrington and Isamu Noguchi to her son Matt Mullican.

Luchita Hurtado (1920–2020) was a lifelong artist, having studied fine art at the Washington Irving Campus in New York and later working as an illustrator and muralist for multiple commercial outlets. She was ingratiated into the art world from a young age and enjoyed the company of many significant 20th-century artists, painting all the while but achieving little success. Her paintings were “discovered” upon the death of her third husband, painter Lee Mullican. In 2016, her works were displayed publicly for the first time since the 1970s at Park View in Los Angeles. In 2019, she was included in the Time 100 list of influential people.

At 98 years old, Luchita Hurtado (born 1929) is finally gaining mainstream recognition for the bright, geometric patterns and the surrealist nature scenes of her virbant paintings, but the Venezuela-born, California-based artist is no stranger to the art world. Though she once rubbed elbows with the likes of Frida Kahlo and Marcel Duchamp early on in her career, Hurtado now has the spotlight to herself, with solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and London, and this very first comprehensive, fully illustrated monograph detailing her artistic process and the prolific output of work from throughout her career.

In addition to reproductions of Hurtado's strikingly contemporary drawings and paintings, Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn also includes a series of vignettes penned by Hurtado's son, the artist Matt Mullican, as well as an interview between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist.