Salomon Huerta

Here are some images of Salomon Huerta's paintings, and some information on him from the Austin Museum of Art (where he had a solo exhibition in 2001).

"The Austin Museum of Art (AMOA) is presenting the first solo museum exhibition of work by Salomón Huerta. Salomón Huerta: Paintings, on view through July 8, 2001 at AMOA-Downtown, features 25 paintings created between 1996 and 2000. The exhibition is organized by the Austin Museum of Art and is curated by AMOA Executive Director Elizabeth Ferrer. Born in Tijuana and based in Los Angeles, Huerta is best known for his enigmatic portraits of anonymous subjects who sit or stand with their backs to the viewer. His work was included in the 2000 Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been exhibited in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. The Austin Museum of Art exhibition will be the first major exhibition of his paintings in Texas.

While his riveting works recall the bright palettes and streamlined compositions of earlier California painters Richard Diebenkorn and Edward Ruscha, Huerta reinvents conventional elements of Pop art, Color Field painting, and portraiture to engage the viewer in unexpected, ironic ways. By eliminating his subjects' facial features, their cultural origins and other attributes, Huerta creates a vacuum that viewers are compelled to fill with their own perceptions, biases, and experiences.

Huerta's subjects are people he encounters on the streets of Los Angeles and who agree to pose in his studio. His oil paint renderings portray his models without ornamentation in functional, utilitarian dress. Placed against glossy, colorful backgrounds in cool, contrasting colors that evoke contemporary fashion layouts and billboard advertisements, Huerta's austere subjects stand or sit squarely, heads close-shaved, arms at their sides, their bodies filling up the picture plane. The smooth surfaces of Huerta's works are characterized by a clean, hard finish, in which traces of the artist's hand are as elusive as the individuals he paints..."