Night Gallery Takes on Marcel Alcal, L.A.-Based Artist on the Rise – ARTnews

Night Gallery, a taste-making Los Angeles gallery which expanded its footprint in the city earlier this year, now represents Marcel Alcal.

Alcal was born in 1990 in the Orange County city of Santa Ana, about an hour south of Los Angeles, and their work, which spans painting, sculpture, and performance, is directly influenced and responding to their lived experience a queer artist of Mexican American heritage growing up in Southern California. The L.A.-based artists work, in particular their paintings, draws on a vast array of references, including art historical movements like Fauvism and Surrealism, as well as the arts of Mexicos Indigenous Huichol people, reality television, and the rituals and symbolism of Santera. What results is an imagined utopia populated by what they call their non-binary girlies thats intended to imagine new possibilities for queer life.

Alcal has previously exhibited with Night Gallery, having had a solo show there in 2020 and having participated in two group shows. They have also had solo shows at Mickey Gallery in Chicago and Deli Gallery in New York, and exhibited work at Ballroom Marfa in Texas, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2020, they were an artist-in-residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles.

In an email, Brian Faucette, Night Gallerys senior director, said, [Marcels] work never ceases to surprise and delight and its a privilege to witness, firsthand, their fantastical universe unfold painting by painting. Its important to us to champion new voices from our hometown of Los Angeles and bring their work to a wider international audience, and we are excited to see Marcel, a born-and-raised Californian, charm and intrigue the rest of the world.

Read the rest here:

Night Gallery Takes on Marcel Alcal, L.A.-Based Artist on the Rise - ARTnews