Anglim/Trimble is proud to present our latest solo exhibition Déjà Vu by Enrique Chagoya.
Focusing on the repetition of history, the exhibition presents continually relevant paintings, prints and drawings created throughout Chagoya’s career, 2004-2025. In his reproving and witty works, Chagoya employs modern and ancient imagery from the United States, Mesoamerica and the Middle East to illustrate the ills of Western colonialism. Contrasting highly saturated pop culture characters with indigenous Mexican symbols, he illustrates the cross-border cultural divide and the increasing cartoonishness of American politics.
Chagoya utilizes handmade amate, a pre-Hispanic Mexican bark paper, in several works including his impressive codices, which reimagine ancient Aztec, Mayan and Mixtec-Zapotec manuscripts if they were to depict our modern world. The multi-panel codex painting Wild Spirits That Shine Obstinately Beyond Walls depicts a border wall adorned in red, white and blue portraits of hopeful Dreamers undeterred by anti-immigrant sentiment.
In a series of red and black works created during the United States’ war on terror, Chagoya employs his distinctive backwards writing to mimic Arabic script. In Squared at the Beach, a flexing bodybuilder with the head of Mickey Mouse stands before a tidal wave of blood – a crimson statement on culpability with echoes throughout the exhibition.
In his most recent work Danza Macabra, titled after the Medieval allegory Dance of Death, Chagoya takes on Trump’s administration with a grotesque, gestural family portrait of Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and more. The caricatures gather at the border wall, in search of the blood that sustains them, yet ultimately dancing towards the demise we all share.
German conservative philosopher Wilhelm Friederich Hegel wrote that history repeats twice, which Karl Marx later amended with "first as a tragedy, then as a farce.” Chagoya further adapts Wilheim and Marx by positing that history repeats twice: first as a tragedy and then as a catastrophe. “It is worse the second time when we do not learn from history. Humans are the only animals that trip twice on the same stone.” –Enrique Chagoya
Please join us for a reception on Saturday, September 13, from 4-6pm in room 209 at Minnesota Street Project. The exhibition is on view concurrently with Colette Standish–Dreamscape of the Erotized Body through Saturday, October 25.
