Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters

Packed with intellectual curiosity, and an insatiable attraction to the form, beauty, and graveyard poetry of horror movies, film director Guillermo Del Toro, established Bleak House, a shrine dedicated to all kinds of imaginative monsters.

A monster of a project begun in “what seemed to be a good idea a few years ago”, explains Del Toro. The tip of the iceberg of Bleak House's artworks were brought to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for the Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters exhibit. 

A broad scope of Del Toro's inspirations is represented in approximately 500 diverse media objects, including drawings, sculptures, paintings, prints, photography, costumes, ancient artifacts, books, maquettes, and film.

Del Toro's fascination with the macabre, horror iconography and comic book fare is manifested through imaginative, old school handmade creatures, with minimal computer generated images. 

Represented films include, among others, Cronos (1993), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Hellboy (2004), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Pacific Rim (2013), and Crimson Peak (2015).

Unifying ideas and themes, the exhibit references a wide range of cinematic, pop-culture, and art-historical sources. 

In addition to Del Toro's hero Forrest Ackerman's Monsters of Filmland magazines, vividly realistic, life-size representation of the people who influenced Del Toro's work are included, such as Mike Hill, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, Ray Harryhausen, and makeup artist Dick Smith.

Del Toro redefines conventional film genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction while transforming ghoulish visions into a poetic beauty reminiscent of Goya. Fluidly presented are the thematic narratives exploring Childhood and Innocence, Victoriana, del Toro's Rain Room, Magic, Alchemy, and the Occult, Movies, Comics, and Pop Culture, Frankenstein and Horror, Freaks and Monsters, and concluding with Death and the Afterlife.

As a humble path towards the enjoyment and appreciation of art, this marriage of horror beauty, and traditional artistic medium is accompanied by an eerie soundtrack, with screams, crashes, thunderstorms and insect sounds that chills the flesh and bones. It is a true delight, reawakening the child in all of us. A must see.

The exhibit runs through November 27, 2016, at the Art of the Americas Building, Plaza Level, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036. For more information call (323) 857-6000 or visit http://www.lacma.org/

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and

the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Following its presentation at LACMA, Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters will travel to its co-organizing institutions: the Minneapolis Institute of Art (February 26–May 21, 2017) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (September 30, 2017–January 7, 2018).