Artist Biography
In his paintings, drawings, and prints, Manuel Ocampo uses inconsistency, contradiction, and reversal to explore a colonial heritage. With a singularly perverse view of contemporary culture, Ocampo makes intrinsically religious paintings that confront the viewer with moral dilemmas, ultimately transforming horror into beauty, and history into art.
Ocampo made his first print, The Compensatory Motif in the Libidinal Economy of a Painter’s Bad Inconscience, an eight color lithograph with chine collé, at Shark’s in July 2001. Here the artist combined appropriated, altered images of his paintings and his collection of ephemera from popular culture to entice (and repulse) the viewer into his moral universe.
Selected Collections: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Fonds National D’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Fukuoka Museum, Fukuoka, Japan; Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna, Lisbon, Portugal; Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
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Prints by the Artist
