Luis Gonzalez Palma - "Arrancame el Miedo" (1998)

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Exceptional Finds | Ancient, Ethno, Fine Art

By Artemis Fine Arts

Mar 20, 2025

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• Lot Description
  Luis Gonzalez Palma (Guatemalan, b. 1957). "Arrancame el Miedo" toned photolithograph, 1998. Signed lower right. Titled lower center. Numbered "P.P. 3/4" lower left. A large-scale limited edition printer's proof of Luis Gonzalez Palma's "Arrancame el Miedo" ("Take Away My Fear") this frontal portrait captures the intense gaze of a beautiful Guatemalan woman, and demonstrates Gonzalez Palma's quest for what he calls "the consciousness of our solitude". Based in Argentina, Gonzalez Palma focuses his lens on indigenous Maya and mestizo subjects from his native Guatemala, staring into the future after suffering years of oppression. According to Gonzalez Palma, this "fixed and direct gaze" simultaneously shows the sitters' "dignity" as well as the "fragility of their being". Size (image): 31.875" L x 31.875" W (81 cm x 81 cm) Size (sheet): 35.5" L x 34.875" W (90.2 cm x 88.6 cm)
  
  Artist's Statement: "From the beginning, my work has been a reflection on the gaze. How are eyes that stare at us constructed in our internal experience? How are shadows, brightness, and all the geography implicit in each photograph interpreted and elaborated within us? If our way of seeing is shaped by the social and the cultural, we can conclude that every gaze is political and that every artistic production is subject to this judgment. The gaze as power. From there, I can feel that the work of art is a possibility to demonstrate this, to question our way of seeing, to question the history that has produced all these gradations of the gaze and therefore, our ways of reacting to the world. In my artistic process I have tried to create images that invite to be examined through what I call 'emotional contemplation,' giving the meaning of their form through their beauty. Over the years I have built scenarios and modified certain faces to create images that allow other perceptions of the world, other ways of understanding it, and of modifying it internally.
  
  In the early stages of my work, I focused on creating certain metaphors through frontal portraits with a fixed and direct gaze that showed the dignity of the models and that, at the same time, made evident the fragility of their being: the face was a pretext to represent the human condition. Portraits in which the loneliness and at the same time the emotional firmness of the subjects could be perceived and in which the gaze was a space of contradictions and ambiguities. In this series of portraits, generally of Guatemalan people, the face functioned as a mirror in which I looked at myself, questioned myself and searched for meaning. In these portraits, the strength of the gaze lies in the power it has to invert my own gaze and takes on its most intense value if it also manages to invert that of the spectator with the same force and impulse with which it presents itself before him. For the observer, to discover himself there, in that internal, silent gaze, accompanied by that motionless face that observes him, is to become aware that we share a common destiny. A reflection on beauty as fragility, memory as pain and time as a fall, the photograph presents death with open eyes…" (source: artist's website)
  
  About the Artist: Born in Guatemala in 1957, Luis Gonzalez Palma lives and works in Cordoba, Argentina. The artist's solo exhibitions include: The Art Institute of Chicago (USA); The Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, (USA); The Australian Centre for Photography, Australia; Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City; The Royal Festival Hall in London; Palazzo Ducale di Genova, Italy; MACRO and Castagnino Museums in Rosario, Argentina; Fundacion Telefonica in Madrid; Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Compostela; Museo Universidad de Navarra, Spain; and photography festivals such as Photofest in Houston; Bratislava in Slovakia; Les Rencontres de Arles in France; Singapore; Bogota; Sao Paulo and Caracas, and more.
  
  Luis Gonzalez Palma has been included in three major biennials: the 49th and 51st Venice Biennale, XXIII Bienal de Sao Paulo, and Bienal de La Habana. Other collective exhibitions include Fotobienal de Vigo, the Ludwig Forum for International Kunst in Aachen, Germany; The Taipei Art Museum in Korea, Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Daros Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland; Palacio del Conde Duque in Madrid, Spain; Fargfabriken in Stockholm, Sweden.
  
  His work is held in numerous public and private collections such as The Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; The Daros Fundation in Zurich, Switzerland; La Maison European de la Photographie in Paris; The Houston Museum of Fine Arts in USA; Fonds Regional d'Art Contemporain in Paris, France; the Fondazione Volume! in Rome, Italy; La Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango in Bogota, Colombia; The Fogg Museum at Harvard University; and The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA; Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada.
  
  Honors include the Grand Prix Photo Espana "Baume et Mercier" in 1999 and monographs on his work include "Poems of Sorrow" published by Arena Ediciones; "The Silence of the Gaze" published by Pelliti Publishing in Rome; "Luis González Palma" La Fabrica Publishing, Spain; "Your/My Pleasure" in collaboration with Graciela De Oliveira, "Documenta"/Escenicas Publishing, Cordoba, Argentina; "Mobius" Museum of the University of Navarra, Tender Puentes project, Spain; "On the Poetic Image, Correspondences of Luis Gonzalez Palma and Llorenc Raich Munoz with an open letter and intervention by Chantal Maillard" Muga Publishing, Spain; and "The Bones of Water" Anomalas Publishing, Spain.
  
  
  
  Provenance: private Bozeman, Montana, USA collection, acquired before 2015; consignor was co-owner of Segura Publishing Company, Tempe, Arizona and acquired this piece directly from Segura during his tenure
  
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  #191280

  Condition

  Signed in pencil at lower right. Titled in pencil at lower center. Numbered "P.P. 3/4" in pencil at lower left. A few very minor creases and slight smudge marks in the margins that do not impact the central image. Otherwise excellent.
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