CURATOR: Magalí Arriola, curator of the exhibition and director of the Tamayo Museum.

The exhibition A Rabbit Split in Half, which MARCO opens on April 28, focuses on artist Julio Galán as the starting point for his work, in which he explored identity, gender, fiction, and theatrical devices.

Produced by the Tamayo Museum, under the curatorship of its director Magalí Arriola, the exhibition delves into Galán’s representations not only through painting, but also through photography and performance, media that served as tools to address gender and identity fictions in his multiple self-portraits.

This is reflected in Galán’s nearly 80 works, mostly paintings and some sculptures, and in more than 50 portraits taken by distinguished photographers such as Graciela Iturbide, Juan Rodrigo Llaguno, Francisco Barragán, and Enrique Badulescu. Also on display are his personal photo albums documenting his connection with great artists of the time, such as Andy Warhol, and international magazines where interviews were published. All the pieces date from 1982 to 2000.

Arriola’s curatorship is not organized as a retrospective or chronologically, but rather transversally, reviewing the artist’s pictorial practice through thematic nuclei on frequently addressed issues such as childhood and adolescence, domestic violence and gender violence, the awakening of desire, and the repression of sexuality.

Another noteworthy theme is the use of theatrical devices in his early work, which become mechanisms of recognition and (self-)representation, resorting to strategies such as cross-dressing and masquerade. Galán’s work highlights the issues of gender and identity as they were raised in the 1980s and 1990s, allowing us to reevaluate its relevance in the present day.