That’s where the beauty is. is the artist’s first big retrospective. The exhibition was compiled by Courtenay Finn for and by the Aspen Art Museum in 2019, since when it has been touring the United States. The Bonnefanten is proud to bring this major exhibition to the Netherlands and to give Kilgallen the place in the canon she deserves.

In the 1990’s, Kilgallen created a furore in San Francisco with her line drawings, which are closely linked to various subcultures and feminist themes. She was well on track to becoming an artist of national and international renown when her life ended prematurely in 2001, at the age of 33. Although this meant she never had a breakthrough in Europe, she was nevertheless pivotal in the art world of the West Coast.

Kilgallen’s work is laced with historical developments. For example, in several works she depicts signs and shop fronts from the Mission District, which hint at a history of migration, civil rights and The American Dream. Sometimes hopefully and sometimes harrowingly, this is contrasted with the contemporary reality of San Francisco: a city that suffered badly in the nineties from drugs problems, the AIDS epidemic, homelessness and decay.

Kilgallen attaches great importance to letters and signs, and she was fascinated by how you could communicate with people you had never seen through art and text. Her work often refers to hobos: homeless workers who travelled the country illegally on goods trains. They left messages on the trains in a secret language, to keep one another informed of news, job opportunities and each other’s ups and downs. According to Kilgallen, it was mankind’s primal, intrinsic desire to leave behind something tangible for others. She therefore gave hundreds of trains a tag – a signature of her pseudonym: Matokie Slaughter.