Herman Aguirre

(Chicago, Illinois, 1992 - )

Herman Aguirre is a first-generation Mexican-American artist, born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, with deep familial ties to the state of Durango in the northwest of Mexico. He received his BFA (2014) and MFA (2017) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017 he was awarded the Lenore Annenberg Fellowship for Visual Art, and he was a fellow and teacher at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He currently teaches in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is represented by Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago and Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee, while continuing to exhibit in various galleries and art fairs throughout the United States. Summing up his biography and his work, Aguirre has stated: "Inspired by my background as a Mexican-American, I have begun to use my art as a voice for social change and to express important ideas within the contemporary art world that are not necessarily visible elsewhere." Indeed, using his personal background as a starting point, Aguirre takes on the weighty issue of gang violence in the U.S. and in Mexico. For example, in his mother’s hometown of Villa Hermosa, a cartel seized part of his grandfather’s land, threatening the lives of his family if they resisted. To survive, Aguirre says, Mexicans either have to become a member of a cartel or pay it off. “You can’t even have a party or a wedding without going through these people. Anybody’s life could be taken. That’s just the way it goes. It’s always bullshit, but what am I going to do about it, right? I only have so much power.” What power he has, Aguirre has realized in artworks and in exhibitions. The title of his recent show, Ocultos (“what is hidden or unseen”), points to the artist’s interest in exposing traumatic events that have affected him, him family, and his community at large. The subjects he explores are deeply-rooted in Mexico’s war on drugs and Chicago’s inner-city violence. These topics are difficult to address in their full moral and emotional depth, and to meet the challenge Aguirre has developed a unique painterly language, informed by time spent in a lab at SAIC learning about the chemistry of paint, charcoal, chalks, and additives. His thick, intensively physical impasto oil painting techniques thus show Aguirre, in his own words, “wrestling with the image, in order to capture the psychological toll these issues have on my community. I am constantly trying to develop a language that adequately represents the world we live in.” In many works, layer upon layer of paint skins (prepared on wax paper, peeled from the surface, and then affixed to the final work using additional paint) quite directly show the accumulation both of the artist’s efforts and of collective memory and trauma. His hope is not to document events in a strictly literal fashion, but rather to memorialize them with greater breadth. The construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction involved in Aguirre’s painstaking processes allow the artist to both reveal and cope with the realities of violence. Ultimately, he refers to this as “the spiritual process of painting,” through which “I am able to confront these realities and the issues that enclose us.”

View objects by this artist.