The publication Julio Galán appears on the occasion of the exhibition Julio Galán that took place at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (2 juni – 15 juli 1990).
The exhibition for the Mexican Julio Galán at Witte de With, but also the one for the Argentine Guillermo Kuitca, were the first comprehensive exhibitions in Holland and the rest of Europe. They were at the same time an experiment for Witte de With: two artists, two exhibitions, two publications and yet connected.
Julio Galán and Guillermo Kuitca’s paintings and objects, however different the visual languages of the two artists may be, fit together in a special way. They contradict and augment each other. In Galán’s bright, colourful, occasionally devout or coarse rural scenes and in Kuitca’s dark, grey, nocturnal portrayals of cities and anonymous houses, the artists depict stories, which are too bright or too dark for any melancholy, yet always balance on the brink of ecstasy or catastrophe, and stories about adolescence, men and women –especially men– and about the continuing life and the future of painting in Monterrey and Buenos Aires, and elsewhere.