Gonzalo Lebrija

Gonzalo Lebrija (b. 1972, Mexico City) is a Guadalajara-based artist working across sculpture, photography, video, painting, and installation. He co-founded the Oficina para Proyectos de Arte (OPA), through which he became a driving force in the internationalization of Guadalajara's contemporary art scene. His work centers on stilling and freezing fleeting moments, exploring the porous borders between life and death, dreams and phenomena, mind and body, eye and spirit, often combining painting, photography, film, and sculpture within a single exhibition or series, with an approach that blends humor, anxiety, and melancholy in works that preserve, with irony and futility, the unquantifiable yet finite moments between life and death. Perhaps his best known work, History of Suspended Time (A Monument to the Impossible), suspends a 1968 Chevy Malibu nose-down over a body of water, freezing an instant of catastrophe into permanence. He has held solo exhibitions at Havana's Palacio de las Bellas Artes, the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, the 13th Istanbul Biennale, and the Center for the Arts in Monterrey, and his work is regarded as among the most significant in contemporary Mexican art today.