Ektor Garcia

Background

Ektor Garcia was born in 1985, in Red Bluff, California, United States.

Education

In 2014, Ektor received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Two years later, in 2016, he got a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University, New York City.

Career

During his artistic career, Garcia took part in many group exhibitions, held at different galleries, including the exhibition at Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, in 2011, Chicago Public Library, Chicago, in 2012, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, in 2013, Judith Charles Gallery, New York City, in 2015, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, New York City, in 2016 and many others.

Also, he had numerous solo exhibitions, including "Uña persona show", at Touche Leather Bar, Chicago, in 2014, "Kriziz", at Kurimanzutto Gallery, Mexico City, in 2016, "Cochi", at Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, in 2017 and others.

In summer of 2018, he undertook a residency in Cove Park, Scotland. Currently, Ektor divides his time between Mexico City and New York City.

Achievements

• Ektor Garcia is a prominent American artist, who became known for his multifaceted and densely layered sculptural installations, which draw influence from handcraft traditions, often with a focus on Mexico and South America, to consider the way, in which objects and materials define gender, cultural identities and societal roles.

Works

More photos

• installation

  • Mano de obra

  • Mas o menos

  • Más o menos

  • Desmadre

  • Portales

  • Portales

  • Empezar

  • Empezar

  • Perro Muerto

  • Ladrilloz

  • Huarache

  • Matanza

  • Community

  • Circular breathing

  • Corpus

  • Pin and mount me

  • Chain mail

Views

Spontaneous, intuitive and frequently revisionist, Garcia’s installations can be viewed as a personal psycho-geography, crowded with references, emotions and tensions. Heavily worked on and intricately crocheted leather and copper panels stitch together narratives of violence, marginalisation and erasure, as well as tenderness and compassion, expressed all the more viscerally through their close relationships to his personal and lived familial experience. Collections of glazed ceramics, found fragments and talismanic objects are visual metaphors for place, mental states, the body and other people, and Garcia interweaves these associations, connecting the past with the present, and the universal with the personal.

Tending towards lightness and permeability, Garcia's assemblages belie many days and hours of intensive labour and physical production. Perhaps masochistically – Garcia treats his body as a tool and his hands like a machine, configured to fervently and dextrously oppose the mass-produced. As such, hands themselves appear as repeated motifs and are evidenced constantly in his work: from the expanses of crochet and hand-welded metal to the figurines, imprinted with finger marks.

By the means of his works, the artist wants his viewers to learn something about themselves. He purposefully never finishes or completes a piece. Ektor wants the public to complete his pieces for themselves, and he provides more questions, rather than answers.

Moreover, Garcia is in constant pursuit of modes of making and presentation, that trouble the division between so-called high and low culture.

Personality

Describing himself as "belonging somewhere else, somewhere liminal and never fixed, on the road and open to constant change", Garcia maintains an itinerant artistic practice, often working on a small scale with easily portable materials in order to stitch, weave, crochet and mold, whilst traveling from place to place. His artistic processes, gestures and decisions are filtered through a perspective of dislocatedness and an anxious, ambivalent identity politics, resistant to the divisions of difference.