Neal Baer Collection

Carlos Almaraz (b. 1941, Mexico City, Mexico; d. 1989 Los Angeles, California) was a prominent Chicano artist working primarily in Los Angeles. Almaraz studied at the Otis Art Institute and spent a few years in New York before returning to California. In the 1970s he became involved with César Chávez’s farm workers’ movement, Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino, and Mechanicano, a cooperative gallery in East Lost Angeles. Almaraz was one of the founding members of the Chicano art collective Los Four, whose other members included Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Roberto de la Rocha, and Frank Romero.

Devil in the Green Room is representative of Almaraz’ neo-noir, expressionistic portraits of East Los Angeles life in the 1980s described as “serenely bucolic to hot, feverish and dangerous” (Otis) and “often reflected signs of his struggles as a bisexual man, as well as his substance abuse, sparked by shame surrounding his sexuality, historical personal traumas, and his search to find himself artistically through coded cyphers” (Ortuzar). The standing naked male figure in the painting wears a devilish mask, reaching out of the frame and facing his back to the woman sits below him facing the viewer. The nude double portrait is likely of Almaraz and his wife, Elsa, whom he married in 1981 and had a fruitful artistic collaboration until his death.

Almaraz died of AIDS in 1989.

Provenance

Ortuzar Projects, New York

Exhibitions

“Carlos and Elsa,” Ortuzar Projects, New York, October 26 – December 16, 2023

See also

Carlos Almaraz in the collection of LACMA

Carlos Almaraz in the collection of the Latin American Museum of Art

Carlos Almaraz in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Carlos Almaraz in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art

“Carlos Almaraz,” Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, February 8 – March 29, 2025

“Playing with Fire: Paintings by Carlos Almaraz,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, August 6 – December 3, 2017

Carlos Almaraz at Visual AIDS

William Wilson, “The Troubled Gift of Carlos Almaraz : Art: LACMA is showing the work of the late Chicano artist who was torn between social activism and the urge for individual artistic freedom,” LA Times, June 27, 1992

“Carlos Almaráz’s art was steeped in the dualities of sexual and ethnic identity,” The LAist, August 21, 2017

Peter Plagens, “Los Four at the LACMA,” Artforum, Vol. 13, No. 1, September 1973.