Skip to main content

Alonso Galue

Alonso Galue

Festival Artist

www.agalue.com/

Alonso Galue is a Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist, puppeteer, and monumental painter based in Chicago. His work explores mental health, folkloric traditions, and displacement through sculpture, painting, and immersive performance. As a curator at Agitator Gallery, he supports artist-led initiatives that challenge dominant narratives and amplify immigrant perspectives.

Galue’s socially engaged projects, such as The Weeping Nation and The Wonder Mask Pilgrimage, transform ancestral rituals into powerful acts of protest and remembrance. He has exhibited across the U.S. and Latin America, including at the Chicago Cultural Center, Elastic Arts, Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zulia.

He welcomes commissions and collaborations that bring narrative, site-responsive work into public art, gallery, and institutional contexts.

Events featuring Alonso Galue

Paradise Aliens

Studio Art

July 12 – 27, 2025

In Paradise Aliens, Venezuelan artist Alonso Galue presents an arresting series of large-scale murals confronting the fragmented psyche of exile. Drawing from Andean cosmology, tropical fauna, and the chaotic violence of border politics, Galue transforms the gallery into a landscape of surreal resistance, psychological rupture, and mythic guardianship. Rendered in thick, urgent strokes of color, these towering works depict gas-masked figures wandering fields of severed monuments, decapitated heads held aloft, macaw-winged deities watching over rainbow-slashed battlefields, and dreamlike terrains hovering between jungle and sky. The result is a visual grammar of trauma and survival. “Myths are our internal maps,” says Galue. “But when you are forced to leave your homeland, those maps disintegrate. Paradise Aliens is about rebuilding inner geography from memory, fear, and imagination.” Inspired by the visual traditions of Diego Rivera, Leon Golub, and Oskar Kokoschka, Galue merges political violence with poetic symbolism. In these works, Venezuelan trauma meets a global reckoning with migration, authoritarianism, and cultural loss. Animal forms—tapirs, guacamayas, and spectral hybrids—become symbols of both ancestral knowledge and contemporary unease. Painted on paper with visceral urgency, these murals are not simply images—they are acts. They demand space, breath, and reflection. They honor the multiplicity of those who live in exile: foreign yet filled with myth, broken yet building.   PARADISE ALIENS [open exhibition through the 2025-2026 Northwestern University academic year] Wirtz Center Chicago 710 N. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60611

Learn More