Gronk US, b. 1954
The hardest thing these days is to make something that’s beautiful; it’s easy to make ugly art. I think it takes a lot more talent to make something beautiful. Beauty to me is when you show something to someone that they’ve never seen before. That’s what a great work of art does; it shows you something that you didn’t know existed.
- Gronk
Gronk is easily one of the most recognized Chicano painters. And yet he remains a mysterious and mercurial figure, just as he was for those who first met him in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is, first of all, the question of his name, its origin traced variously to a story about the Amazon in National Geographic or to a character in the short-lived CBS television series It’s About Time. Indeed, Gronk has gone by many names since the 1950s, under-scoring not only his artistic self-invention but also his underlying conceptual approach to art, identity, and politics. Rather than vesting himself in the object (both thing and goal), Gronk privileges the idea, because ideas can change and can bring change.
- Courtesy Max Benavides
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GronkFaces (# 5), 2001 -
GronkUntitled, 2001
