Curtis Gutierrez is a self-taught painter and muralist who grew up in the Bay area and got his artist career started in downtown Los Angeles. He credits his father, a sign painter, for introducing him to the world of paint, and bestowing him with the confidence and legacy to make painting his life’s passion.

In a profession full of fine art MFA’s, Gutierrez has always been considered something of an outsider. Even the Los Angeles Times called him “a maverick”. He paints large canvases, either figurative or abstract, and is known for his expressive, instinctual approach and his aggressive brushwork. He has shown widely, in the Los Angeles area, on the East Coast, and in France, Spain, and China, and his canvases have appeared in many major motion pictures.

Gutierrez came out of the Chicano Mural movement of 1980’s Los Angeles, which has deeply informed the epic scale and narrative in his work. He painted the first mural in what is now called the Arts District, on the Binford Building in 1986. He has continued to paint murals on both coasts, with his most recent one painted in a refugee camp in Calais, France while serving there as a volunteer builder. 

His paintings deal with the overarching themes of migrations, generations, legacies, and our connections to one another, with a style he has developed that is uniquely his own. His work is grounded in the figure and the gesture of painting, but the artist often wholly reinvents his work, at a pace that has only increased over the years. Gutierrez has developed a distinctive, visual language throughout all these evolutions, sometimes in only black and white, and sometimes with a striking use of color. The bold, gestural line work and brash sense of urgency define his body of work, retaining the intensity of his work as a young artist but with the perspective only experience, life, death, and fatherhood, can bring.

Gutierrez's drawing style has largely remained distinct from, and an indirect source for, his painting until recently. Dense but looser, he is allowing the imagery to stand on its own, and letting the gestures that have always driven his work show more and more. His recent move to the California high desert has influenced his subject matter, even including landscapes, which had previously never featured in his work.