Born in Guadalajara in 1950, Gil de Montes moved to the United States at the age of twelve and spent his teens and early career in Los Angeles, where he became involved in the Chicano art movement. He moved to Mexico City in the 1980s, before returning to California and eventually being drawn back to Mexico. He is now settled in the rural fishing town of La Peñita de Jaltemba on the Pacific coast of Nayarit.

Gil de Montes’ artistic practice is guided by disciplined attention and playful experiment. Whilst being marked by the eclectic influences of artists including, among many others, Marsden Hartley and the figurative painters of the Bay Area in the 1950s, there are also frequent references to pre-Hispanic artistic traditions. His paintings are often populated with lush, varied forms from dreams and daily experience alongside the iconography of Huichol art: the canvas, for him, is a space to redefine the relationship between the real and the imaginary.

While bearing witness to border crossings and transgressions – geographical and cultural – these new paintings also evoke a powerful sense of the local peculiarities of the place in which they were created. Rainy season is an invitation to stay inside, the artist’s gaze turning inwards. The images, inflected with Gil de Montes’ acute sense of the absurd and his characteristic lightness and generosity of spirit, are the embodiments of an inconclusive search for meanings behind ideas, incidents, the mundane and the deadly serious.