Luis González Palma: Möbius presents a pivotal chapter in the artist’s decades-long exploration of image, identity, and perception. Widely celebrated for his poetic portraits that delve into the psychological and cultural scars of Guatemala’s colonial and civil war past, González Palma now turns the lens inward. In this open-ended series, initiated in 2013, he revisits and reconfigures the very visual language that brought him international acclaim.

Named after the Möbius strip, a surface with only one side and one edge, symbolizing infinity and transformation, the series embraces contradiction as a generative force. González Palma breaks down his own icons and symbols, integrating geometric abstraction, gold leaf, and painterly interventions with remnants of his earlier sepia-toned portraiture. Realism and abstraction, figuration and form, rupture and harmony coexist within the same image, offering a meditation on the cyclical nature of experience and creation.

In Möbius, metaphor and symbol fragment and reassemble through what the artist calls "lyrical abstraction"—a process that embraces uncertainty and flux. These works extend beyond traditional photography, blurring the line between image and object, surface and depth. As much about the physicality of the photographic print as the emotions it conjures, this body of work challenges the viewer to consider perception itself: how we see, what we assume, and how meaning is made through both presence and absence.

Möbius is not a conclusion but a renewal. It is a rupture that opens space for new visual and conceptual dialogues, rooted in the past but continually moving forward, without fixed beginning or end.

Luis González Palma (b. 1957, Guatemala City) is a pioneering figure in contemporary Latin American photography. Originally trained in cinematography and architecture, he is best known for his psychologically charged portraits and symbolic imagery that confront themes of ethnicity, colonial history, and spiritual introspection. Since the late 1980s, his work has been exhibited internationally in major biennials and institutions, including the Venice Biennale, Les Rencontres d’Arles, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Havana Biennial. González Palma combines photographic technique with materials like bitumen, gold leaf, and hand-painting, creating deeply textured images that are as much about surface as they are about inner experience. He currently lives and works in Córdoba, Argentina. Read more »