From his provincial origins in the small northern Mexico town of Múzquiz, Coahuila, to his meteoric rise in Manhattan's East Village art scene, to having achieved international standing at the time of his early death at forty-seven, Julio Galán was radically transgressive. The artist extended contemporary Mexican painting beyond the cultural criticism of Neo-Mexicanism (neomexicanismo), redefining Mexican identity as gender-expansive in his art. Galán combined gender-fluid imagery, his performative persona, queer self-representation, and cross-cultural visual and textual references to create large-scale, layered, dialogical visual puzzles. An artist ahead of his time, Galán's content and imagery is relevant to contemporary LGBTQ+ social movements. Replete with full-color reproductions of Galán's artwork and photographic material, Teresa Eckmann's book serves as the first English-language monograph on the artist's life and work. Anyone interested in art in Mexico and Latin America will find this book an indispensable addition to their library, and it will be a core book on the study of this artist for decades to come.

Intellectually, Julio Galan's paintings arouse several dichotomies at once: sacred and profane, pastoral and urbane, ego and alter ego. Art historically, they reference surrealism and postmodern collage, incorporating found materials, the decorative, and the kitsch. But their subject matter is undeniably the artist's obsession with himself.