Julio Galán

Painter whose magic realism drew on folk images and pop art
Julio Galán, who has died aged 47 of a brain haemorrhage, was one of Latin America's best-known contemporary artists, first brought to international notice by Andy Warhol and strongly influenced by the grotesque imagery of Francis Bacon and the homoerotic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Often dubbed el niño terrible (the enfant terrible) of Mexican art, he was seen as a trailblazer by gay artists throughout conservatively-Catholic Latin America.

Galán's neo-expressionist style was often compared with that of his earlier compatriot, Frida Kahlo, but apart from conceding their shared narcissism, he preferred to be labelled a "magic realist" than a surrealist or "neo-Mexicanist". Most of his work, blending Mexican folk imagery with pop art elements, reflected the pain of growing up a closet homosexual in the macho Mexico of the 1960s and 70s. In his early work, he disguised the tortured homosexuality of his inspiration by using distressed, sensual images of children, animals, saints, flowers, fruit or other symbols that hinted at but protected his painful secret.

It was after Galán moved to New York city in 1984, at the age of 26, that Warhol spotted his work and printed some of his paintings in his magazine Interview, a breakthrough that sucked the young Mexican into Warhol's East Village pop art scene. Having lived firmly in the closet in Mexico, his eyes were opened by the overt homosexuality of Manhattan, despite the newly publicised phenomenon of HIV/Aids.

By then, Mapplethorpe's controversial homoerotic images were widely known, and inspired Galán to "deal with my vehement sexuality" openly in canvasses depicting homosexuality and sado-masochism. His kitschy, camp work - often, like Mapplethorpe's, using faces and figures cut out from magazines - reflected the times, and he was given his first US exhibition at New York's Art Mart gallery in 1985.

During a 1988 exhibition at the Boymans-van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, one critic wrote that his work "stood up surprisingly well" to those of Salvador Dalí on permanent display, including Dalí's famous Shirley Temple, the Youngest Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (1939).

In the words of New York Times critic Michael Brenson, writing in 1990: "Julio Galán is a clever provocateur who as a painter is a bit of a lion tamer, a bit of a high-wire performer and a bit of a wistful, but defiant clown." When an apparent self-portrait by Galán, titled China Poblana (1987), was chosen as the only Mexican work at the multi-cultural exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1989, he was thrust into international stardom in the contemporary art world. The painting showed a figure resembling Galán wearing a China Poblana, a traditional Mexican woman's folk dress named after a historic servant-slave, a Chinawoman from the town of Pueblo. In 1993, his large work, Sí y No (Yes and No, 1990), was given pride of place at the entrance to New York's Museum of Modern Art, leading visitors into the huge, 300-work, 25-gallery exhibition, Latin American Artists of the 20th Century.

Julio Galán was born in the mining town of Múzquiz in the Mexican state of Coahuila, brought up somewhat cosseted on his grandfather's mining estate and educated in private schools. His early works were inspired by the dolls, toy soldiers and other exotic artefacts his grandfather had brought back from foreign trips.

After his liberating move to New York City in 1984, his first painting was Paseo Por Nueva York Con Dolor de Cabeza y Barajas de la Loteria (A Walk Through New York With a Headache and Lottery Tickets, 1984) depicting a giant figure that looks like a Manhattan hotel bellhop, towering over the city's skyscrapers carrying a Sacred Heart, the whole painting bordered by subways and other city images. In his later years, both in New York and after returning to work in Monterrey, Galán increasingly added post-modernist physical trimmings to the labyrinths on his canvasses, sticking on ribbons, dried flowers, plastic fruit, beads, feathers or pieces of jewellery.

He also became known for defacing his paintings with his own graffiti, scribbling abstract citations such as "I want to die", or "I bite myself but I don't eat myself", or "I'm addicted to myself."

In an interview for an exhibition catalogue, Galán was once asked: "Are you in love with yourself?" "Sure," he replied. "This is what I paint, this love of me. Once, I took it so far as to make love to myself. Before going to sleep, I had put one of my pictures between my bed and the wall close to my bed. Suddenly I woke up, and the emotion was so strong that I grabbed the painting, put it on top of me and made love with it."

He is survived by two brothers and two sisters.

· Julio Galán, artist, born December 5 1958; died August 4 2006.

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