Ana Segovia keeps close the worst painting he ever made. The work leans against a wall in a second-floor closet of the artist’s studio, located in San Pedro de los Pinos, a relaxed, working-class neighborhood in central Mexico City. It is the first thing visitors are shown.
The piece is not as bad as Segovia proclaims, but it is not good, either, just a woman’s arm holding up the hem of her pink polka-dot dress. It is full of the rich, saturated colors that make Segovia’s art exciting to look at, lots of orange, red and blue crashing into each other. But it does not say much about the painter’s most pressing topics, machismo, gender roles, the history of cinema and painting itself.
“You’d think I’d be embarrassed, but I actually sort of own it,” said Segovia, 34, who has switched from using “she” to “he.” “I’m like, yes, this failed, and I know exactly why.”
Better to use men as subject matter, Segovia has learned, and now that is what he does almost exclusively, producing satirical takes on masculinity that have earned wide recognition — and representation from one of the country’s most prestigious galleries, Kurimanzutto. This month, Kurimanzutto will present a solo show of his work at Frieze London.
Segovia’s paintings tend to be simple in composition, often solitary figures set against sparse backdrops, and nearly all reference 20th-century cinema, particularly Westerns from the 1930s and 1940s. Some are actually painted directly from movies made in Mexico or the United States; others are appropriated from stills found online.
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