Recent work by Malaquías Montoya
Exhibition catalog produced in conjunction with Montoya's traveling exhibition Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment. The full-color catalog features silkscreen prints and paintings along with related research dealing with the death penalty and penal institutions.
Montoya's images are equally powerful, disturbing and introspective; he wants viewers to feel that they have witnessed an atrocity committed in their name. As Montoya states, “We have perfected the art of institutional killing to the degree that it has deadened our national, quintessentially human, response to death. I wanted to produce a body of work depicting the horror of this act.” In these works, Montoya illuminates the inhumanity of state-sponsored premeditated murder – a situation where the use of punishment to discourage crime encourages criminality.
