Dr. Lakra

The principal monograph on the Oaxaca-based artist and tattooist Dr. Lakra (Jerónimo López Ramírez, b. 1972), whose drawings overlay vintage printed matter with the iconography of tattoo, folk ritual and the underworld.

Published by Editorial RM in 2010, the book reproduces some 120 works in colour: mid-century Mexican magazine covers, pin-up advertisements, calendar prints and Japanese woodblock images on which Lakra has inked gang tattoos, skulls and bones, Aztec warrior heads, spider webs, serpents and demons, so that the polished commercial surface and its dark, funerary underlayer share one sheet. Sculptural pieces and modified objects extend the same logic into three dimensions. Texts in English and Spanish include a conversation with Gabriel Orozco and essays by Eduardo Abaroa and Pedro Alonzo.

Lakra, the son of the painter Francisco Toledo and the poet Elisa Ramírez, began as a tattooist and built his drawing practice from that trade's vocabulary. He is represented by kurimanzutto in Mexico City, and the year of this book also brought his first US museum survey, at the ICA Boston, curated by Alonzo. The library also holds Los dos amigos, his 2006 collaboration with Abraham Cruzvillegas.