Today we’d like to introduce you to Gonzalo.
Gonzalo, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’m from Lima, Peru. In 2016 I’ve reached a certain level of success in my own country while struggling with my creative aspirations. At the time I was the photo editor (and video content editor) for a publishing house, in charge of around 7 magazines, including one of the biggest in Peru: “COSAS”. That role gave me the opportunity to expand my experience in editorial photography, as well as a creative director. On the side, I kept an art practice that I was eager to turn into my main focus. That’s how I decided to give grad school a chance and started building my application for different MFA programs. The process took me years (longer than I expected), I had to actually go through the process of understanding my artistic voice, and keep evolving my technical abilities, while also improving my english and balancing finances when choosing New York as the location.
After a long path full of obstacles and small achievements, in 2020 I was about to get the Fulbright scholarship. As a 2019 alternative candidate I got accepted for 2 MFA programs, and I was next in line to get awarded with the scholarship. The covid pandemic started and I got cut off from the process. In 2021 I finally was able start my MFA at Pratt Institute, thanks to getting a couple of scholarships and a lot of sacrifice.
I graduated in 2023 and since then I been living in Bushwick (Brooklyn, NY), working in my art practice, I recently (2025) had a solo exhibition at Black Brick Project (Gallery in BK, NY) curated by Diego Anaya. Im currently working in my new collection of ceramic lamps soon to be on sale in my website and a couple stores in Brooklyn.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Lots of struggles, including a full pandemic. But everything has made me stronger and keeps me driven to reach my artistic goals.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My current work emerges from a long and conflicted relationship with Catholicism, which informed my visual language as much as it produced rupture. Leaving the Church became a necessary break to inhabit my sexual and gender identity, and now grounds an ongoing project of constructing a queer theology. Through invented myths, heretical figures, and unstable divinities, I explore belief as an embodied condition, where desire, power, and the sacred are continually reconfigured.
Across painting, drawing, ceramics, and digital animation, this inquiry takes form as a personal mythology inhabited by theatrical, ambiguous figures that oscillate between the sacred and the profane, the seductive and the grotesque. Suspended mid-gesture or mid-revelation, these figures exist in states of transformation and performance. I approach the body not as a fixed identity, but as porous, exaggerated, and in constant flux.
My relationship to spirituality is filtered through humor, excess, and contradiction. Drawing from the visual language of Christian painting, its devotional compositions, archetypal figures, and theatrical use of the body, I rework these traditions through a queer lens.
How do you think about luck?
I had luck at meeting good friends along the way. For an immigrant sometimes it gets lonely, and having someone to reach out during the inevitable struggles of life is really priceless.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.gonzalominano.com
- Instagram: @gminano
Image Credits
Portrait by Pablo Velez
