Roberto Gil de Montes 

Untitled (Face), 1996

Gil de Montes was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1950. When he was a teenager, his family relocated to East Los Angeles. After high school, he spent two years studying photography at Los Angeles Trade Technical College before going on to receive a BFA and MFA from Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County. As a young artist, Gil de Montes was an active member of the Chicano art movement and co-founded the experimental and influential art space LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). Working alongside artists such as Carlos Almaraz, Gronk, and Teddy Sandoval, Gil de Montes developed a more expansive practice that included ceramics and photography. The artist moved to Mexico City in 1980, where he experimented with painting on large-scale black-and-white photographs. He then returned to Los Angeles to concentrate on painting and also began teaching drawing and Latin American art history at California State University, Los Angeles. From 2000 to 2005, Gil de Montes lived in San Francisco, and produced a series of works on paper influenced by the recently released photographs of members of the United States Army and CIA committing war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In 2005, he and his partner Eddie Dominguez moved to La Peñita, a fishing town on the Pacific Coast of Nayarit, Mexico, where he continues to live and work.