Antique

Gardeners stand in for art collectors in Ramiro Gomez's riff on David Hockney's 1968 painting, American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman)
toggle caption © Ramiro Gomez/Courtesy of Abrams

Los Angeles is a city of extremes: There are neighborhoods so luxurious only millionaires can afford them and neighborhoods so poor that residents work several jobs to pay the rent. Now, a young LA painter is bringing these neighborhoods together on his canvases.



Workers tend a garden in Gomez's 2015 Jardín no 1.

Ramiro Gomez paints modernist houses in Beverly Hills, perfectly appointed kitchens and exclusive shops on Melrose Avenue. His pictures have nothing, and everything, to do with his background. Gomez's mother is a janitor, and his father works the graveyard shift driving a truck. Workers like his Mexican immigrant parents show up in his paintings — part of the invisible landscape of luxury LA.
"Someone will always be working to keep it nice," Gomez says. "Whether it's a home in the Hollywood Hills or Beverly Hills or the Paramount Studios."
Gomez puts those "someones" on his canvases. He shows mostly Latino gardeners tending perfect lawns, maids cleaning tiles in gleaming bathrooms and nannies gathered in the park.



Gomez takes ads for luxury products and imagines the individuals who make them possible. Above, his 2015 work, DVF.

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