Gabriel, 2021, Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches, 182.9 x 152.4 cm, MMG#33348
Francisco, 2020, Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 121.9 x 91.4 cm, MMG#33077
Guillermo, 2020, Oil on canvas, 45 x 36 inches, 114.3 x 91.4 cm, MMG#32397
Miguel & Christian, 2017, Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches, 182.9 x 152.4 cm, MMG#29521
John Sonsini Studio, 2021, Querétaro, Mexico
John Sonsini (b. 1950, Rome, NY) received his Bachelor of Arts from the California State University, Northridge in Northridge, CA.
He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; Emerson Gallery, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan, UT.
Sonsini has been included in group exhibitions at numerous institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.
His work may be found in the collections of The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Fundación AMMA, Mexico City, Mexico; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, and elsewhere.
Sonsini lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Querétaro, Mexico.
Years ago, when artist John Sonsini began approaching Spanish-speaking day laborers in Los Angeles to ask if he could paint their portraits, he had some communication problems. "My Spanish was so poor," Sonsini admits.
First, he was introducing himself as an artista, a word that many Spanish speakers associate with a singer or dancer. But when he switched to pintor that didn't necessarily clear up the confusion — the men thought this professorial-looking, Italian-American with a salt-and-pepper beard was offering them a job painting houses.
Christie's features John Sonsini as one of the top 10 American post-war and contemporary artists to have in your collection.
A selection of artists whose burgeoning art-world profiles are matched by their rising markets — featuring works offered in our Post-War to Present auction in New York.
I think John Sonsini may be the greatest portrait painter in the country.
That’s because his pictures of working-class men capture essential aspects of their individuality while revealing essential things about the world in which we live.
Sonsini’s portraits raise profound questions about identity — race, class, sexuality — while laying bare the cultural, economic and political underpinnings of the ways we see ourselves, especially as those visions take shape in relationship to others: people with different backgrounds, different upbringings, different dreams.
There have always been multiple entry points for viewers to come to terms with John Sonsini’s bravura portraits of single or multiple male subjects, most of whom are Mexican day laborers, and “the age of Trump” has unexpectedly provided us with yet another. We as a people have never in living memory been forced to listen to the occupant of the White House vilify Hispanic migrants and asylum seekers with the excessive slander and bitterness as its current occupant, and for millions of Americans, such rhetorical excess has prompted its own collective soul-searching.
