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Grobet, Lourdes

Mexican, 1940-2022

BiographyLourdes Grobet made photographs that centered the culture and experiences of the working class of Mexico, often exploring the contrast between the popular culture of urban and rural communities. Grobet’s subject matter was diverse—ranging from landscape to portraiture—but she is best known for her photographs of luche libre (free fight) wrestlers. Beginning in 1980, this almost two-decade long project depicted the wrestlers both in and out of the ring, contrasting the heightened performance of their jobs with their daily movements. Grobet was formally trained as a painter but was drawn to the immediacy of photography as a medium and—through a painterly attention to light, color, and gesture—used her practice to emphasize beauty in the canonically mundane.

Lourdes Grobet was born in Mexico City. She studied visual arts at Iberoamericana University, Mexico, graphics and photography at Cardiff College of Art, Wales, and photography at Derby College, England. Her photographs and films have been shown by Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Branly Quay, Paris; and more. Grobet’s work is in the permanent collections of The Gernsheim Collection at University of Texas at Austin; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; and many others.