Julio Galán

Biography

The first New York show was cancelled because of the neighbours. It was due to open in June 1985 in an apartment on the Upper West Side, but the board of the co-op building banned the exhibition.

Galán was born on 5 December 1958 in Múzquiz, a mining town in the north of the state of Coahuila; some sources give 1959 as the year of his birth. His family was wealthy and strictly Roman Catholic. He attended a private school in Monterrey and then enrolled in architecture at the Monterrey Institute of Technology. He began to paint while still a student: according to one account, he was encouraged by a Monterrey art dealer, Guillermo Sepúlveda, in whose gallery his first exhibition took place in 1980. In the following years he showed in Monterrey, Mexico City, Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. While still in Mexico he painted dresses for the fashion designer Nicole Miller. She introduced him to Paige Powell, who worked for Interview in New York, and Powell showed his work to Warhol. Warhol printed several of Galán’s pieces in the magazine, and in 1984 the artist moved to New York.

Powell arranged two shows for him. When the apartment exhibition was cancelled, the Mexican ambassador Joaquín Bernal allowed her to use the gallery of the Consulate General in Midtown Manhattan. The opening coincided with the Mexico City earthquake of 19 September 1985. Galán then took part in the exhibition “Mexico, The New Generation” at the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas, and in the autumn of 1986 Powell organised his second New York show, in the apartment of the critic Edit DeAk in SoHo.

From 1980 to 1998 he was represented by the dealer Annina Nosei, and he showed many times at her New York gallery: in 1987, 1989, 1990, 1992 and 1996. Shows in Europe ran in parallel: at Barbara Farber’s gallery in Amsterdam, at the Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone in Rome, at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (1990), at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Pabellón Mudéjar in Seville (both 1992), and at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris (1995 and 1998). In Mexico he had exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in 1987, 1988 and 1990.

Galán’s paintings are autobiographical. Among his works are “Tange, Tange, Tange” (1988), shown in Paris in 1992, and “Anal y Isis”, dated 1971, which was included in the exhibition “Féminin-masculin: le sexe de l’art” at the Centre Pompidou in 1995. I would not venture to say more about his subjects; all that is known is that his paintings and collages contain many details from his own life.

In 1994 he won the Premio Marco of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO). That year he also had exhibitions at the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. The last of the solo shows listed for his lifetime, “My Mirrors”, opened at Robert Miller Gallery in New York in 2001.

Galán died on 4 August 2006; sources give the place of death as Zacatecas or as a plane flying to Monterrey. After his death his work was shown in solo exhibitions at MARCO in Monterrey (2007), at the Museo Amparo in Puebla and at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City (both 2008), and a new one was held at MARCO in 2023.