In his paintings, drawings and prints, Manuel Ocampo uses inconsistency, contradiction and reversals to explore a colonial heritage. With a singularly perverse view of contemporary culture Ocampo makes intrinsically religious paintings that confront the viewer with moral dilemmas, ultimately transforming horror into beauty, and history into art.
Ocampo made his first print, “The Compensatory Motif in the Libidinal Economy of a Painter’s Bad Inconscience”, an eight color lithograph with chine collé, at Shark’s in July 2001. The artist combines appropriated, altered images of his paintings and his collection of ephemera from popular culture to entice (and repulse) the viewer into his moral universe.
Manuel Ocampo received a Lila Wallace Artists at Giverny Award, a National Endowment award and the Rome Prize in Visual Arts at the National Academy in Rome. Ocampo’s work has been widely exhibited and is in the collections of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna, Lisbon, Fonds National D’Art Contemporain, Paris and the Fukuoka Museum, Japan.
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