When the Mexican tattoo artist known as Dr. Lakra arrived in February for his first New York solo show, he headed straight for the New York Public Library . He began researching some of the subjects that fascinate him, like 19th-century medical instruments, witchcraft and anthropology.

“When I travel, I always go to public libraries,” he said . “I’m always hungry for images.”

The results can be seen in this 39-year-old artist’s show , on view through April 23 at the Drawing Center in SoHo.

It consists of a giant wall drawing, constructed around ribbons of paint that metamorphose into different things, including hanks of hair, statue- topped pedestals, faces, animals and internal organs. On the far wall a one-meter-tall skull faces off against a taller portrait of a Maori warrior.

It’s a departure from the smallerscale work that made Dr. Lakra’s reputation: tattoo-like drawings that he inks on found objects like dolls, toys and pictures of scantily clad women from midcentury magazines.

“Lakra is a much more complex artist than people realize,” said his longtime art dealer and friend Jose Kuri, a partner in the Mexico City gallery Kurimanzutto.

“It’s very easy to pigeonhole him as a tattoo artist who entered the art world with these tattoos on vintage magazines. But he’s really well educated in classical painting .”

Born in Mexico City as Jeronimo Lopez Ramirez, Dr. Lakra is the eldest son of the anthropologist and poet Elisa Ramirez Castaneda and the painter Francisco Toledo, one of Mexico’s towering cultural figures.

A rebellious teenager, he dropped out of high school and hung out at Mexico City’s El Chopo street market, where a nascent tattoo scene was under way.

Back then, he said, tattooing was associated with Mexico’s criminal underclass.

He and his friends were soon practicing the art on one another, using equipment jury-rigged from sewing needles and cassette player motors.

“You used to put the ink in the bottle cap of the beer you were drinking,” he said, “or you would clean one you found in the street.” (Along the way he earned his nickname: “Dr.” because he carried his equipment in a doctor’s bag, and “lacra,” a Mexican expression that suggests a scar or a mark on the skin, and the scum of the earth.)

Yet he was also leading a parallel art-world life. After quitting school he joined a workshop led by Gabriel Orozco, where his fellow students included Gabriel Kuri, Abraham Cruzvi l legas and Damian Ortega, now leading lights of the new Mexican scene.

That’s also how he met his dealer, Jose Kuri, Gabriel’s older brother. The others went on to form Temistocles 44, a collective where they explored p er forma nc e and conceptualism.

Dr. Lakra decamped to Berlin, where he spent two years squatting and panhandling. By 1993 he had moved to Oakland, California, drawn by the tattoo scene.

He met the tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy at a tattoo convention. Mr. Hardy, impressed by Dr. Lakra’s drawings, helped the younger artist.

“I couldn’t do a proper apprenticeship because I was working,” Dr. Lakra said, referring to his job as a dishwasher. “He let me be in the shop just watching.”

It was also Mr. Hardy who gave Dr. Lakra his New York gallery debut, by including him in a tattoo show that he organized with the Drawing Center in 1995.

By then Dr. Lakra had returned to Mexico City and set up his own tattoo shop. He also began showing his work with La Panaderia, an artist-run space, and creating street murals.

Mr. Kuri lured him to Kurimanzutto soon after it opened in 1999, and Dr. Lakra quickly realized the benefit of being associated with a commercial gallery.

“They were selling my drawings for two or three times the price I was selling them for at tattoo conventions,” he said. “I didn’t have to bargain.”


By CAROL KINO