Luchita Hurtado dedicated her life to exploring universality and transcendence through her art. Her work, characterised by a profound fascination with nature, utilised a wide array of mediums including crayon, ink, graphite and oil, merging abstraction and representation in evocative and unique ways.
At the age of eight, L. Hurtado immigrated to the United States, settling in the Latin American neighbourhood of Inwood, New York, with her mother, sister, aunts and cousins. Despite coming from a non-artistic family, L. Hurtado was always drawn to the arts. She pursued her passion by enrolling at Washington Irving High School and studying art and theatre under the guise of dress-design classes, unbeknownst to her mother. In 1936, after graduating high school, she attended classes at the Art Students League.
In 1937, while volunteering at La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper in New York, L. Hurtado met and married Chilean journalist Daniel del Solar. He introduced her to the vibrant New York art scene, forming connections with artists such as Roberto Matta (1911–2002) and Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). In 1944, after divorcing D. del Solar, L. Hurtado began her career as a fashion illustrator for Condé Nast and a muralist for Lord & Taylor. L. Hurtado’s personal life was marked by significant challenges, including the loss of a son to polio and a tumultuous marriage with Wolfgang Paalen (1905–1959). However, she found solace with artist Lee Mullican (1919–1998), a prominent figure in the Dynaton movement, whom she married in 1957.

The 1970s saw L. Hurtado’s involvement in the feminist movement. She deliberately critiqued the Surrealist movement by positioning a female voice as the subject, instead of the muse – as exemplified in Untitled, 1971, from the series I Am. Linking feminism and her fascination with humanity’s interconnectedness with the natural world, she depicted birth from her perspective in many self-portraits. Her work during this period was a diary of sorts, created in spare moments when her children and husband were asleep.

In 2015, nearly two decades after L. Mullican’s death, L. Hurtado’s work was rediscovered when his studio director unearthed her paintings while organising her husband’s archives. At 95 years old, L. Hurtado’s contributions to art were finally recognised on a grand scale. In 2016, she had her first solo show since 1974, in Park View, Los Angeles. Her work was included in Made in L.A. 2018, an iteration of the Hammer Museum’s acclaimed biennial exhibition. In 2019, she was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people and received the Americans for the Arts Carolyn Clark Powers Lifetime Achievement Award.

One childhood memory L. Hurtado often recounted was pinning a butterfly to a wall, an act that haunted her and underscored her lifelong reverence for nature. Committed to environmental advocacy, she believed in the urgent need to address environmental issues. L. Hurtado’s artistic journey is a testament to her resilience, independence and profound connection to nature. Her legacy is one of introspection, environmentalism and a ceaseless quest to capture the universal truths of human existence through art.