Roberto Gil de Montes: Water Drops on Burning Rocks

Five decades of paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs from an essential Chicano artist, influenced by his careers in East Los Angeles and Mexico. This exhibition will be on view at LACMA from December 20th through June 20th, 2027.

Pre-Sale will ship Fall 2026. 

Roberto Gil de Montes’ (born 1950) artistic trajectory is directly informed by his birth and early life in Mexico, his status as an immigrant and art student in the United States, his career in Los Angeles as a practicing artist and his subsequent move to La Peñita, a small coastal town in Mexico. His artworks imagine and connect both countries, making his paintings, photography, ceramics, prints, drawings and performances critical to the mutable notions of Latinx art and Latin American art.

This book presents Gil de Montes’ career across time and geography, showing the transborder consciousness of his oeuvre. He affirms the male body as both subject and object of counter-hegemonic sexuality, and he explores the relationship between the human body and the landscape. In a transparent dialogue with the history of Surrealism in Latin America—and also with the tradition of ex-votos—the artist fills large canvas surfaces with characters who often find themselves in situations of pleasure, violence and existentialism.


Edited with text by Raphael Fonseca, Rita Gonzalez. Text by Lisbet Barrientos, Roberto Gil de Montes, Azul Silverio, Roberto Tejada, Aurora van Zoelen Cortés.

- Hardcover 
- 184 Pages
- 9.5 x 12 inches
- Published with Denver Art Museum/Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 12/15/2026