Gustavo Godoy was born in Ontario, California. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Godoy is currently the Chair of the Visual Art department at Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles.
Frequent trips to his great-grandmother’s home in Tijuana, Mexico sparked Gustavo Godoy’s interest in architecture, construction, and intuitive invention from an early age. Working alongside his father, Godoy developed an appreciation for the everyday building materials of concrete and wood that would later become the cornerstones of his artistic oeuvre. Whether the end result is a system of angular wooden planks nailed together to form abstract climbable structures, concrete blocks conjoined into large ceremonial mounds, or ceramic objects through which one looks to isolate a set of stars or a moment within a landscape, Godoy’s sculptures entice the viewer to interact directly with the artwork. Recent investigations have led him to ancient sites in Central Mexico and Yucatan where he is building an allegorical bridge to the mythologies of heroes, the cosmos, and his own family’s journey to southern California. Godoy’s formal and material investigations call attention to the objects that mark sites as sacred, ceremonial, or in flux - how through collective inference and cultural construction these objects become reliquaries for our untold, retold, and even new histories.
Solo exhibitions include Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; the Bakersfield Museum of Art, Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL; Prism Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Happy Lion, Los Angeles, CA. Group exhibitions include the SUR: Biennial, Norwalk, CA; Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston, TX; OHWOW, Miami, FL; the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Centre d'art contemporain du Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux, France; Mexico Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico; Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Workspace, Brooklyn, NY. His work is found in the collections of institutions and individuals such as the La Coleccion Jumex, Mexico City; MOCA Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL; Phillip Niarchos, Paris, France; Tom Ford and Richard Buckley, Beverly Hills, CA; John McIlwee and Bill Damaschke, Los Angeles, CA; Steven Biller, Palm Springs, CA; and the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA. Publications on Godoy’s work can be found in Frieze, Art in America, Art Review, Sculpture Journal, art ltd., ArtUS, Vogue, and the LA Times.