The first work by Mexican-born artist Julio Galán ever to appear at international auction in its first offering in 1987, Los Cómplices (The Accomplices) is the most important painting by the artist to enter the secondary market in three decades. Executed in New York at the height of Galán’s mature production, Los Cómplices offers a complex meditation on kitsch, and its role in the conflict between national, sexual, religious and gender identities.

Born to a wealthy family in the small town of Múzquiz, Coahuila in Northern Mexico, Julio Galán’s strict Catholic upbringing had a lifelong effect on the imagery and thematic devices of his painting. At ten he moved to Monterrey to attend boarding school, eventually pursuing a degree in Architecture at the University of Monterrey. However, driven from an early age to paint, he abandoned architecture in pursuit of art; following his first solo exhibition in Monterrey in 1980 with Guillermo Sepúlveda, he relocated to New York in 1984. Free from the conservative confines of family life, Galán was able to live openly as a gay man for the first time; inspired by the flourishing of the Downtown Scene and exposure to works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Sigmar Polke, Julian Schnabel and others, he entered into a period of furious productivity. A 1985 solo exhibition at Art Mart Gallery caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who included several of Galán’s works in an edition of Interview Magazine that same year. In subsequent years his work went on to receive significant critical acclaim throughout the United States, Europe and Mexico; Galán was included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial, and he was the only Mexican painter invited to participate in Magiciens de la Terre (1989) and 100 Best Contemporary Artists (1990) at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey followed shortly thereafter, cementing his international reputation as the foremost Mexican painter of his generation.

In Los Cómplices, Galán presents in human scale a figure who bears his own features, androgynized - soft, incarnadine lips poised in a suggestive smirk and blushing cheeks are offset by dark stubble and a heavy brow. He is clad in a graphically rendered traje de charro, the iconic suit worn traditionally by Mexican cattlemen (and Mariachi musicians). A vivid silk tie and cascading woven serape in the colors of the Mexican flag cloak him to complete the ensemble. Like many of his contemporary Neo-Expressionists, in particular Julian Schnabel, Galán exploits self-portraiture to probe complexities and surface contradictions in his identity. For Galán, these questions are often around gender and nationality – here, an undercurrent of tension arises between the hyper-masculine garb of the main figure and his seductive, feminine features. Contemporary to Richard Prince’s Cowboys series, Los Cómplices likewise complicates an icon of ruggedness and masculinity in the context of contemporary commercial culture. The traje de charro surfaces not just as an emblem of national identity and pride but, exhibited in American context, as an icon of Kitsch - a mass-produced image, beloved and banal. “If there is a country of Kitsch, it is Mexico, and Galán knows it… The type of Kitsch which Julio adopts in these works is sarcastic mockery of the real Kitsch, which is a natural, but not conscious product of mass manufacturing.” (Ida Prampolini, “Recovery of Memory,” in Julio Galán, Mexico City, 1993, p. 341) The detailed trappings of his surroundings, from the impatient chestnut horse to the glossy, faded wallpaper, cartoonishly striped rug and drab landscapes seem to lampoon both a real, experienced domesticity and an outsider's imaginary vision of Mexico.

The otherworldly, tense qualities of this image, from the shadows that fall in opposite directions to the luminous collection of cattle-horn cups that shatter and leap out of the composition, are underscored by the inscription. Behind the figure, a screed of wishes from a tortured narrator to a beloved is scrawled in a hasty hand; the narrator of this emotive incantation, wants to “Burn down a museum… burn my heart burn you…burn everything…throw a match in a truck full of gasoline and explode everything. I want you to go to another world and tell me if I need to repent all this or no. I want to cast a glance of love to bring you into my arms, and then for my heart to burn, so that your heart will burn… that we go to hell and burn it all…” Prampolini describes Galán as a “Rimbaud of Mexican cut” (ibid., p. 343), whose beautiful, tortured works offer a kind of catharsis or exorcism of painful contradictions at the heart of one’s identity. Here, the damning incantations, offered in the context of this otherworldly domestic setting, seem to express the inner torture of the author moreso than a call to violence. The difficulty of reconciling his strict Catholic upbringing and deeply-held spirituality with the sexual freedom and exploration Galán pursued in the second half of his life. His struggle with these unresolved questions around life, death, sex and identity speaks directly to our present moment.