February 6 – March 19, 2016
kurimanzutto is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Mexican, Basel-based artist Rodrigo Hernández.
Working with the most classical media and techniques of art making, including drawing, sculpture and painting, Hernández’s practice interrogates the nature of art, the divisions that characterize it, and their relationship to contemporary epistemology. For all the apparent naïveté of his work, it takes nothing for granted, asking what a drawing is or a figure or even the moon. He draws on a number of aesthetic references, which range from Meso- American culture to European modernism, among others, to develop a formal vocabulary that is all his own.
For this exhibition, Hernández presents a new body of work that, oscillating between representation and abstraction, the pictorial and the sculptural, combines elements from two specific sources: the illustrations that the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias made for his book El arte indígena de México y Centroamérica and a variety of elements from the visual vocabulary of the Italian, avant-garde movement Futurism. Interested in the meditative interiority of the one (e.g., the spiral of pre- Colombian art) and the quixotic explosiveness of the other, Hernández has filtered these two points of reference through his own idiosyncratic way of seeing things, transmuting them into objects that thrive on formal, spiritual and ideological ambiguity.
