Elefante: Leopoldo Goût

October 3 - December 31, 2024

Overview

CHICAGO (September 26, 2024) - Elefante is a solo exhibition by renowned Mexican artist,author, and filmmaker Leopoldo Goût, featuring a dynamic range of multimedia works. With a bold, maximalist vision, the exhibition spans textiles, bronze sculptures, paintings, video, and sound, exploring Goût's enduring obsession with contradictions, dreams, and the ephemeral nature of existence. International in scope and deeply tied to Goût's decades-long career, Elefante portrays image-making as a migratory journey.

Leopoldo Goût is an artist, writer, and filmmaker who works across mediums to capture the ephemeral: an abstract and figurative clash with memory and humanity, with chaos. Born in Mexico City, Goût grew up among poets, musicians, explorers, activists, filmmakers, scientists, and visual artists. Their stories and ideas inspired Goût, who quickly became part of that community. He embarked on numerous artistic pursuits: painting, drawing, sculpture, filmmaking, digital art, soundscapes, performance, and more. He studied in London at the renowned Central Saint Martins School of Art through a full scholarship from the Mexican Center for the Arts and the British Council. He also won the Erasmus scholarship, despite not being European.

It was at school that he began to approach his work as a kaleidoscope of references that inhabit and obscure easy origins and meaning. “I want to emulate and echo that fleeting moment when you wake from an intensely vivid dream, but immediately those images and senses start to dissipate,” Goût says. “I believe my work lives in that ephemeral space. Now you see it, now you don’t.” What may at first appear random, without any form whatsoever, is in reality a carefully crafted, unique perspective on what it means to be conscious. All his projects, including films and novels, influence each other in unexpected ways. Goût’s perspective is a confluence of the modern and ancient, order and disorder, and speaks to a wide audience.

ELEFANTE PROGRAMMING AND ANCILLARY EVENTS SCHEDULE:

10/02 - Film Screening, SW ARM Party

5:30 - 7:30pm: Screening of Common Thread, the documentary we made with Chicago-based filmmaker Esteban Alarcón about Leopoldo Goût and his process of making the tapestries in Teotitlan del Valle. It also explores the world of the artisans behind the work, as well as his studios in Mexico & NYC. RSVP here