Larry Madrigal, the UNM College of Fine Arts Frederick Hammersley Visiting Artist, presents an artist talk and open studio event in Albuquerque this spring.
2025 Frederick Hammersley Visiting Artist Talk: Larry Madrigal
Thursday, February 20, 5-6 pm
Albuquerque Museum
The Department of Art at the University of New Mexico announces contemporary painter Larry Madrigal as the Spring 2025 Frederick Hammersley Visiting Artist.
Madrigal (b. 1986, Los Angeles) is a Mexican American painter living and working in Phoenix. Through a contemporary rehabilitation of the historical genre picture, Madrigal’s work expresses a complicated association with normalcy, masculinity, and close relationships. Drawn mostly from the experience of starting and raising a family, he is interested in the daily rhythms of life, and how they are entangled with recurring themes relating to the human drama. He is especially inspired by comedy, and its common use of familiarity to reveal deeper and complex realities that are overlooked or not fully considered. The commonplace becomes an arena for sacred reflection on the mysterious nature of being, and a platform to explore painting’s power to promote empathy and wonder across diverse cultural and social backgrounds. His paintings are a suspension and celebration of the precariousness by which our most mundane daily rituals are balanced on a precipice just above total anarchy.
Madrigal completed his MFA at Arizona State University in Tempe in 2020. He has had solo exhibitions with Veta Gallery in Madrid, Spain, Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles and New York, Galeria Nicodim in Bucharest, Romania, the Phoenix Institute of Contemporary Art, and more. He has also been included in group exhibitions in Bucharest, Paris, Tokyo, Tel-Aviv, New York, and Los Angeles. Madrigal is represented by Nicodim Gallery.
Learn more about Madrigal and contemporary figuration at the upcoming Open Studio or Artist Talk in April 2024. See below for event details.
Events
Artist Talk: Enjoy Larry Madrigal’s Artist Talk at the Albuquerque Museum on Thursday, February 20, 5-6 pm.
Open Studio: Join artist Larry Madrigal and your creative community on Thursday, April 24, 3-6 pm.
The Frederick Hammersley Visiting Artist program began in UNM’s Department of Art in 2017. Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009) first gained critical recognition in 1959 as one of the “Four Abstract Classicists” along with Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, and John McLaughlin, whose paintings were featured that year in an exhibition of the same name. Hammersley’s classicist paintings helped to define West Coast abstraction as a contrast to Abstract Expressionism. While he spent his early years in California, Hammersley enjoyed years as a professor at UNM beginning in the 1970s. He was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 and received NEA grants in 1975 and 1977.
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