ISLAA Spotlights is a series of focused presentations that highlight pivotal works from the collection across our programmatic spaces. These displays create opportunities for close engagement with artists and ideas that remain underrepresented in dominant art historical narratives, offering a platform to explore individual practices in greater depth.
Spotlight presentations are open during select hours and by appointment. To inquire about a tour or visit, please contact us at info@islaa.org.
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The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to present a selection of works by Mexican artist Lourdes Grobet (1940–2022) as part of the Spotlights series.
This presentation brings together a rare and compelling selection of works by Grobet, offering a focused look at her series Paisajes pintados (Painted Landscapes), produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Widely known for her immersive documentation of lucha libre, Grobet's early photographic explorations reveal her interest in subverting photography's documentary impulse through performance, color, and conceptual play.
In Paisajes pintados, Grobet manipulates the camera not to capture the landscape but to intervene in it. By applying house paint directly to landmarks of the southwest English landscape and then photographing these interventions on chromogenic prints, she blurs the boundaries between representation and reality, landscape and stage, photography and performance. Her images are at once playful and critical, exploring how vision is constructed and how nature becomes spectacle. The result is a body of work that is as much about the act of looking as it is about what is seen. Back in Mexico, she returned to the working process of this series between 1982 and 1983, incorporating new media and using a more vibrant palette.
The works also reflect Grobet's deep engagement with the political and artistic ferment of her time. As a founding member of the artist collective Proceso Pentágono and a close collaborator with figures such as Felipe Ehrenberg and Marcos Kurtycz (some of whose exchanges can be found in the ISLAA Library and Archives), Grobet embraced experimental strategies that challenged institutional and aesthetic norms. Her practice unsettled both genre and gender, moving fluidly between photography, installation, and conceptual art—always with a keen eye for irony and subversion.
This presentation, drawn entirely from the ISLAA collection, situates Paisajes pintados within a broader reassessment of Grobet's legacy as more than a chronicler of lucha libre. It invites viewers to reconsider her role as a pioneer of Latin American conceptual photography—one whose work remains strikingly contemporary in its critique of visual culture, authorship, and the mediation of place.
—Blanca Serrano Ortiz de Solórzano