Chorizo, 2025, oil pastel and acrylic on wood panel, 48 x 48"

Gronk is a legendary LA Chicano artist and co-founder of the groundbreaking artist collective known as Asco. Along with Patssi Valdez, Willie F. Herrón III and Harry Gamboa Jr., they created actions, conceptual performances, photography, printed matter, and other forms of socio-political statements in the aftermath of the protests and demonstrations of the Chicano Moratorium in the early 1970s. After being told by a LACMA curator that Chicanos did not make art, only murals, the group famously tagged the museum building and like Duchamp, claimed it as their own artwork. Years later during the Getty Museum’s first PST art initiative in 2011, LACMA gave Asco a major survey exhibition. After Asco, Gronk went forward with an independent career as an exhibiting painter and collaborator on stage productions with the renowned opera producer Peter Sellars. 

His third solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, X Reason, brings together an ensemble of paintings, drawings, furniture, mural set designs, and ceramics. The letter “X” carries multiple, often contradictory associations: it can signify a kiss or a warning of poison, suggesting both love and death; it can also serve as a placeholder for identity and gender, as in “Latinx,” offering a more neutral and inclusive terminology. Placing the “X” before “Reason” opens the title to these competing meanings, suggesting the ways in which emotion, identity, experience, and circumstance continually shape—and complicate—the ways we make sense of the world. X Reason is an algebraic marker in the equation to solve our societal malaise.

Gronk’s work is woven with literary and classical theater references, mythologies, and histories of the human condition. In the current exhibition, black painterly silhouettes of torsos recall Greco-Roman archaeology but with haunting movement, suggesting the march of dehumanized subjugated souls. In one painting the figure is labelled "Chorizo," a vulgar slang for meat. In another torso painting the word "Echo" refers to the Greek mythological figure who was cursed with the inability to speak her own thoughts, only repeating what she just heard, a trait that could easily be an indictment of American voters that lack discernment.

The exhibition also includes a 16 foot abstract mural on four connected panels of wood, each 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide. Titled Conquest, the painting is wildly decorated on the back of each panel with spray painted stencils of tanks and other patterns. Gronk explains his work in the theater taught him that moveable set designs should also have images and messages on the backs that only the stagehands could see. For this installation of Conquest, the panels are displayed front/back, front/back so that the visual language from both sides is revealed and commingled.

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