Please join us on Friday, January 17 for the opening reception of Luis González Palma: Un Recuerdo, Un Sueño | A Memory, A Dream, works from the Schneider Gallery collection spanning the past four decades. Luis González Palma (b. 1957, Guatemala) chronicles contradictions in hierarchies of ethnicity, class, and religion through photographs charged with tactile materiality.

Luis González Palma highlights erasure and wear in both subject and material approach. Embracing highly tactile photo techniques, the artist manipulates static images with painterly motion, using bitumen and asphaltum to emphasize the subject’s arresting gaze. Working in transparency over gold leaf, González Palma captures evidence of his process - remnants of handling marks, scratches, cuts, and folds are recorded in the gold ground. The visible action of each piece unfolds into the suggestive dimension of memory. 

In early portraiture, González Palma interrogates the weaponized distinction of “mestizo,” individuals of Mayan and Indigenous descent who face discrimination and dissociation from their ancestry. The subjects of absence and memory continue as prescient themes in González Palma’s work as he identifies idiosyncratic qualities of personal identity excluded from the political and religious hegemonies that form his environment.

The Bodyguard series features nine goldtone portraits expressing nuances of individuality at an intimate scale. His subjects wear dramatic ruff collars, reminiscent of 16th- and 17th century class symbols, their characteristics unified under the costume of colonial authority. González Palma places these portraits in unique vintage daguerreotype and ambrotype cases, originally designed to fit in a pocket and be carried close to the body. Each intricately crafted case holds a single figure, shielded between the covers.

Luis González Palma was born in Guatemala and lives in Cordoba, Argentina. He has held exhibitions at The Art Institute of Chicago, USA; The Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, USA; The Australian Centre for Photography, Australia; Palacio de Bellas Artes de México; The Royal Festival Hall in London; Palazzo Ducale di Genova, Italia; MACRO and Castagnino Museums, Rosario, Argentina; Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, and Santiago de Compostela, España, among others. He has been included in expositions internationally, including at Les Rencontres de Arles, France, the 49th and 51st Venice Biennials, Italy, Fotobeinal de Vigo, Spain, XXII Biennial in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the V Biennial in Havana, Cuba. González Palma’s works are held in numerous public and private collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Daros Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland, La Maison Europeénne de la Photographie in Paris, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts in USA, la Foundation pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris, France, the Fondazione Volume! in Roma, Italia; the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango in Bogotá, Colombia; The Fogg Museum in Harvard University, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA; the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan. 

This exhibition is presented with generous support from Verge Frames and Schneider Gallery.

Image: Bodyguard Series, Platinum/Palladium on Japanese gampi tissue paper, 17 x 21 inches, sheet: 21 x 28-1/2 inches