Camille Rose Garcia was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, California. Her stunningly subversive images define her signature style based on elaborate socio-political narratives that the artist hides beneath layers and nuances of fairytale charm, which subtly criticise the failures of the capitalist utopias celebrated by American countercultures.
William Burroughs’s cut-up writings and surrealist movies, as well as vintage Disney and Fleischer cartoons, influence Garcia’s layered, fragmented descriptive scenes. The surfaces of her paintings are worn-out as if layers have repeatedly been painted over, alluding to medieval motifs or to 1950s movies. As a result, her figures become remote cousins of classic fairy-tales and early-twenty century cartoons, inhabiting the bed lands of the artist’s twisted mind.
Garcia’s works grotesque yet persuasively beautiful, explore obscurity and reflect the artist’s childhood memories, which seem to be warm and misty, on the one side, fictional mirrors of the counterculture of Los Angeles that was somewhat ominous and violent, on the other side. As she said during an interview, “things that make me mad motivate me”.
Garcia’s work has been displayed internationally in galleries and museums and featured in numerous magazines including Juxtapoz, Rolling Stone, and Modern Painter. Her artworks have been exposed in the Los Angeles County Museum and in San Jose Museum of Art’s, which held Garcia’s retrospective “Tragic Kingdom”. Garcia has also collaborated with The Walt Disney Family Museum for the exhibition “Camille Rose Garcia: Down the Rabbit Hole,” where she showcased a series of Disney-inspired illustrations.
Among her great exhibitions there are also her participation in “Art from the New World” at the Bristol City Museum, “Pop Surrealism”, held at the Museum of Visual Arts Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto, Italy, “Turn the Page” at The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and “Cross The Streets” held at MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Italy in 2017.
