In his paintings, Ana Segovia (b. 1991, Mexico City; lives in Mexico City) twists assumptions about masculinity through a queer lens. Working with an aggressive palette of fluorescent colors, daring compositions, and cinematographic framing and cropping, Segovia undermines the gendered basis of national identity built around hypermasculine archetypes—such as the charro or cowboy—that have been standardized by film. The artist, who is a direct descendent of major players in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, an era spanning from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, has been using film stills drawn mostly from this auspicious tradition as a source for his paintings.

In MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia, he continues his engagement with film archives, this time turning to Roger E. Alamos’s I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1983). The film, a variation on 1980s musical dramas, recounts a love story between Buck, an aspiring artist, and Mario, an undocumented dreamer working as a ranch hand in a fictional Southwestern town. The exhibition presents three suites of paintings illustrating stills from crucial scenes in the film. Also included are copies of Alamos's script and a mural based on the film's end credits, both of which subtly stage an unexpected plot twist.

MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant, and Anastasia Kahn, former Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia is the second exhibition in the recently relaunched MOCA Focus series, which presents an artist’s first solo museum show in Los Angeles and centers on new or discrete bodies of work. Begun in 1992, the original MOCA Focus was dedicated to presentations of distinct bodies of work by artists working in all media and featured a roster of distinguished local and international artists, including Renée Green (1993), Franz West (1994), Margaret Honda (1994–5), Toba Khedoori (1997), Catherine Opie (1997–8), and Jorge Pardo (1998). MOCA Focus quickly became core to the museum's mission and identity as the artist's museum. Over a subsequent three-year period in the mid-2000s, the series was revived briefly but powerfully, featuring primarily Los Angeles-based artists and representing the first Los Angeles museum exhibition for artists including Eric Wesley (2006), Lecia Dole-Recio (2006), Alexandra Grant (2007), and Sterling Ruby (2008). With this relaunch MOCA provides artists a critical opportunity to have their first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, which includes a monographic catalogue.

Major support is provided by Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, Eugenio López Alonso, and the MOCA Global Council.

Generous support is provided by kurimanzutto, Mexico City / New York.

Additional support is provided by Marc J. Lee.

Publication support is provided by the Nimoy Fund for Emerging Artists.

This exhibition is made possible by generous endowment support from the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation Fund to Support the Work of Emerging Artists.

Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions with major funding provided by Tatiana Botton, The Goodman Family Foundation, and Alicia Miñana and Robert Lovelace. Generous funding is provided by Michael and Zelene Fowler, The Earl and Shirley Greif Foundation, Pamela and Jarl Mohn, Jonathan Segal, the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation, and Pamela West.