Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

“If I was an outsider looking at America or the West,” Luis Jiménez posed to Artforum in 1984, “what would I see? What would I be looking at?” And, in answer to his own question, he asserted, “It would be the strong and vibrant images that stand out, like the cowboy, not those coming out of the fine-art situation. It would be the motorcycle, the automobile...” These strong and vibrant images—and their myriad, often turbulent, cultural associations—are what Jiménez used to forge his artistic career. Over the course of four decades, he would become known for his electric depictions of life in the borderlands of the American Southwest and an unrestrained approach to using Latino cultural vernacular that was more-than-once interpreted as confrontational. 

The son of Mexican immigrants, Jiménez was raised in El Paso, Texas, where he worked in his father’s neon sign shop beginning at the age of six. He enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in 1960, first studying architecture and then switching to art. Five years after graduating, he received a solo show at New York’s Graham Gallery, which served as a major milestone. Though he would live in New York—where he was employed as a social worker organizing dances for Latino youth—Jiménez ultimately returned to the Southwest in the 1970s. 

Jiménez created the present work for his 1981 exhibition at Denver’s Sebastian-Moore Gallery; the exhibition featured the monumental, larger-than life drawings as free-standing cutouts that were both sculptural and reminiscent of roadside signage. As noted in a catalogue essay for Man on Fire: Luis Jiménez, “Honky Tonk...was made a time of soul-searching, after a bad divorce. Jiménez sees it as a an extended self portrait, the passionately entwined figures (“sleazed-up” images of his friends) perceived from the viewpoint of the artist’s lonely figure on the edge of the crowd.” Laden with emotion and physicality, the Honky Tonk works have both the unreal veneer of camp and the sincerity of the autobiographical. As Jiménez reflected, “I started drawing out my Country and Western idea, all these people that were part of my life at that time, in a [honky-tonk]. So it was a kind of self-portrait and portrait of all these people…”

Works from the Honky Tonk series are included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.