San Diego Museum of Art
Balboa Park, San Diego, California
27 February - 18 July 2010

VIEW EXHIBITION  |  EXHIBITION PRESS

IMAGES: A Tail for Two Cities, Drawing Installation and Deconstruction

VIDEO: La Cola Para Dos Cuidades | A Tail for Two Cities
by Rajee Samarasinghe

Time Lapse Video Feed: Hugo Crosthwaite's drawing at San Diego Museum of Art

Born in Tijuana, Mexico in 1971, Hugo Crosthwaite spent his childhood in nearby Rosarito. At a young age, he taught himself to draw after studying the black and white reproductions in books owned by his father such as The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. This formative experience led to a fascination with black and white compositions.

Crosthwaite received a B.A. in 1997 from San Diego State University. Though Crosthwaite currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, the influence of the Mexico-California border region lingers in his work. Filled with diverse and hybrid cultures, his work represents a synthesis of the art historical canon and contemporary human experience. He explores the immediacy of drawing, while simultaneously demonstrating a keen eye for detail. While Crosthwaite has depicted cityscapes of Tijuana through numerous drawings, this exhibition focuses on his rendering of the figure. Working primarily with charcoal and graphite, he melds the fragility of humanity with through references to popular culture, daily life, and recent history such as the events of September 11 and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. His figures exude a brutal beauty: they are as awe-inspiring for their physical forms as they are for their dramatic sensibilities that suggest baroque, surreal, and film noir influences.

This exhibition is a testament to the powerful work being created by Crosthwaite, an artist with local origins. The works on view here are from the permanent collection of The San Diego Museum of Art and several local private collections. During the course of the exhibition Crosthwaite will create a new work that will complete this installation and will become a part of the Museum's permanent collection.

This exhibition is curated by Amy Galpin, Project Curator for American Art, San Diego Museum of Art