* Above, a cute little doll with a farting naked girl tattoo and black skull luchador mask, in Lakra's studio. Awwww.
Wanted to quickly throw up this link, to the profile I wrote for ArtMag on the artist Dr. Lakra. ArtMag, based in Berlin, profiles artists and documents exhibitions featuring works from the Deutsche Bank collection of contemporary art.
Dr. Lakra, represented by the Kurimanzutto gallery in Mexico City, is a key artist in the collection's holdings on paper and from Latin America. From my piece:
Small-framed and soft-spoken, the Doctor isn't much of a talker. But in the course of my visit to his studio, Dr. Lakra reveals himself to be an artist whose path to commercial success has been as unorthodox as the contents of his work. He never went to art school. Or any school at all, it turns out. Instead, Dr. Lakra spent his formative training years hanging around punks and tattoo artists in Mexico City, squatting in East Berlin just after the Wall came down, and bumming around Los Angeles and San Francisco. That's where he honed his craft and absorbed Chicano culture by tattooing cholo Mexican gangsters and working with the greats of Californian tattoo artistry at the time, such as Ed Hardy.
The piece includes original photos, samples of Lakra pieces from the DB collection, and the voices of art theorist Mariana Botey, and of Friedhelm Hütte, the bank's global head of art.
It was an enriching trip, visiting Lakra in Oaxaca, as I posted previously. Jeronimo Lopez Ramirez is an active member of his community, a gifted artist, and I do believe, belongs to the true and borderless tribe of permanent punks.
... You know who you are.