Ink on vintage magazine
34 x 24.5 cm


Often repurposing and adapting vintage material, Dr. Lakra is perhaps best known for works on paper where he adorns existing images with unexpected decoration. Dr. Lakra oftentimes extends the iconography and stylistic approach of tattoos to other aspects of his work, in some cases explicitly drawing on the skins of printed figures. The women in these works on paper have both been lavishly adorned: In Untitled (Pin-Up), the artist has taken a page from a traditional 1950s-style pin-up magazine and covers most of the female figure’s exposed skin, including two tattoos on the her face. In Untitled (Salome), the bulk of the adornment was done to the background of the image, where Dr. Lakra overlaid a psychedelic pattern from which the silvery figure seems to emerge. He also painted a piece of gold jewelry which snakes and drapes across the character’s body with the same gold ink used for the background. In much of his work, Dr. Lakra creates transgressive tableaus often relying on unexpected combinations of imagery and iconography. He creates seductive yet unsettling and historically confusing scenarios, making a new hybrid image which plays with the rules and history of representation and reveals his subversive sense of humor. Like a surrealist game of exquisite corpse, where each element is drawn without view of the other parts, his works create sites for conversations between contrasts. These combinations create an uneasy kitschy erotica, mixing historic, religious, and cultic imagery with present-day hallucinations in a way that makes it hard to decipher whether these interventions beautify or deface the images they decorate. (TBA21)


*1972 in Oaxaca, Mexico | Living and working in  Oaxaca, Mexico