b.1982, Mexico City

Fleshy, gunky, meaty, gooey – these are among the adjectives with which Georgina Gratrix describes her paintings. Through the use of recurring characters and motifs, the artist works tirelessly against repetition. She describes portraiture as the discipline of “painting two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. How do you keep making that into something?” For Gratrix, the challenge, to “never feel like I’ve already made this painting,” is the game – one in which the artist is compelled to stretch the arena of portraiture and still-life in canvases filled to the brim with paint that create something more than likeness. “A relationship is a third entity. It is never just, ‘Who is this person?’ but ‘Who is this person, to me?’” When asked what she would consider to be a flattering portrait of her subject, Gratrix answers, “That isn’t really my area of expertise.” Instead, she is interested in how people choose to represent themselves, working, more often, from photographs that are easily Google-able, and the selfies that swamp social media platforms. Often, she only feels a painting coming together in a moment of erasure, of wiping away eyes painted over eyes, or an easy gesture of pulling apart any tendency from a subject to save face. Proposing a revisionist approach to the tired and self-serious genres of historical painting, those “stodgy, stoic canvases by so many important men,” in the artist’s words, the resulting paintings are at once seductive and unsettling; tactile for their textured surface, disconcerting for their image.