Artist: Chelsea Culprit
Exhibition title: Malas Madres
Venue: Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico
Date: September 26 – November 16, 2019
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Lulu, Mexico City
Lulu is proud to present a solo exhibition of the Mexico-City based artist Chelsea Culprit.
Known for vibrant high-heeled figures, explosive palette and multimedia production, Culprit is taking a much more reduced approach to the material component of the exhibition at Lulu. The show revolves around a new body of work developed over the summer in a mountain setting. The exhibition sees the artist further developing their specific pictorial vocabulary with a striking material economy which does anything but diminish the dramatic impact of the work. Using nothing more than home-made charcoal on unprimed canvas, Culprit creates a fantastical natural world inhabited by seemingly urban, nocturnal chimeras or trickster wood sprites. These masked, high-heeled figures elliptically lurk, elastically cavort and all but dissolve into their arboreal surroundings, (in)organically collapsing the boundary between the human and non-human in an elegant tangle of lines. Clearly performing (a quality aided by their quasi-mural-sized scale), they seem to fluctuate between wanting to seduce or terrify, irresistibly inviting the viewer to enter their fluid wilderness. Despite the material simplicity of the work, it nevertheless writhes and roils, thanks to the artist’s bold and confident mark making, with a patent formal opulence and feverish energy. Here desire and being become a splendidly knotted and strangely shaped thing.
Chelsea Culprit (b. 1984 in Paducah KY, USA, lives and works in Mexico City). A selection of recent solo exhibitions includes: (2019) Fear of Seduction, Queer Thoughts at Maureen Paley, London, U.K.; (2018) DMing Purgatory, N.Y.C., NY (2017) Fishnets, Uma Certa Falta de Coerencia, Porto, Portugal; Right to Remain Elegant, Galeria La Esperanza at Barba Azul, Mexico City, MX; (2016) Miss Universe, Yautepec, Mexico City, MX. A selection of group exhibitions includes: (2019) Princesses de Villes, Palais De Tokyo, Paris France; Paint Also Known As Blood, curated by Natalia Sielewicz, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland; Call Giovani, curated by Dorothea Dupuis, Revolver Gallery, Lima, Peru (2018) Dwelling Poetically, curated by Chris Sharp, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia; Pintura Reactiva, Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City, MX; Breaking Shells, curated by Justine Do Espirito Santo, The Koppel Project, London, England.
