Artists’ Reception: La LUCHA / de la Torre Brothers
La LUCHA / de la Torre Brothers: Turbulent Times and Works by Los Angeles Chicano Artists
Curated by: Hannah Sloan (in collaboration with Eleana Del Rio of Koplin Del Rio and Jeannie Denholm of SCAPE)
October 15 - November 14
Artists’ Reception: Saturday, October 24, 6-8 PM
The de la Torre Brothers and other artists will be in attendance.
SCAPE Annex presents La Lucha, a pop-up exhibition pairing Turbulent Times, a selection of glass and lenticular works by Einar and Jamex de la Torre, with a complementary group of works by Los Angeles Chicano artists, curated by Hannah Sloan. The exhibition coincides with the brothers’ ambitious immersive exhibition The Tipping Point at Laguna Art Museum, on view through January 24, 2027.
Alongside the de la Torre Brothers, curator Hannah Sloan brings together works by seminal Los Angeles Chicano artists Judithe Hernández and Gilbert “Magu” Luján, both members of the landmark collective Los Four, as well as José Lozano, with works by a younger generation of artists including Victor Reyes, Javier Carrillo, William Camargo, Francisco Palomares, and Jacqueline Valenzuela.
About the Artists
Brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre were born in Guadalajara, Mexico. In 1972, a sudden family move took them from a traditional Catholic school in Mexico to the small Southern California beach town of Dana Point. Both studied at California State University, Long Beach, and have taught at the renowned Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State. Today, they live and work on both sides of the border, in Baja California’s Guadalupe Valley and in San Diego. The contradictions of the immigrant experience and bicultural identity remain central to their practice.
Collaborating since the 1990s, the brothers have developed a distinctive visual language encompassing mixed media, blown glass, installation, photomurals, and lenticular printing. Their approach is additive, layering material upon meaning in a humorous, multilayered baroque that draws on religious iconography, German Expressionism, Mexican vernacular arts, and Pre-Columbian art. Together, they have received a United States Artists Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation award.
Judithe Hernández and Gilbert “Magu” Luján were members of Los Four, the influential Chicano art collective that became the first Chicano artist group to receive a major exhibition at a mainstream American museum. Hernández, a muralist central to the 1970s East Los Angeles renaissance, has spent five decades developing a vivid, mythic visual language in pastel. In 2024, she became the first artist to receive a major retrospective at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture. Luján (1940–2011) created a playful cosmology he called Magulandia, populated by pyramid-mounted lowriders driven by anthropomorphic dogs and inhabited by a mythologized Los Angeles.
José Lozano (1959–2025) was a celebrated painter and draftsman whose work explored the cultural interplay between Mexico and Southern California. Born in Los Angeles and raised partly in Ciudad Juárez, he developed a visual language shaped by Mexican popular culture, everyday life, humor, and memory. His paintings and prints are populated by dense crowds, lucha libre masks, and sharply observed scenes of human comedy.
Javier Carrillo, who leads the printmaking program at Art Division in Los Angeles, paints the work trucks of immigrant laborers, piled high with mattresses, tools, ladders, and the materials of a day’s work. Carrillo sees these overloaded vehicles as modern-day beasts of burden, carrying the weight of the labor that builds and sustains Southern California. His paintings render them with both reverence and affection.
Victor Reyes fuses Indigenous cosmology, Chicano culture, and the urban landscape of Los Angeles in phantasmagorical narratives where the past is not erased but transformed. For Reyes, lowriders “function as sacred vessels, chariots, time machines and ceremonial carriers, like ritual masks or secret objects.” Following the legacy of Chicano artists Carlos Almaraz and Gilbert Luján, he creates his own mythic cast of jaguar women, warrior cholos, and hybrid figures who “function as protectors and witnesses of everyday people trying to embody resilience and strength.”
Jacqueline Valenzuela grew up watching lowriders cruise Whittier Boulevard. She sees a kinship between the ornate, bedazzled Catholic church and the lowrider’s extravagant chrome and glittering paint: both embrace flamboyance and are rooted in acts of veneration. Working with auto paint, faux fur, and other materials associated with the custom shop, she creates mixed-media works she considers reliquaries, carrying “histories of labor, family, aspiration and cultural knowledge passed between generations.”