Rodrigo Ramírez Explores the Anxiety of Existing in 'While Being Plastic Membranes'

Fresh off his sold-out run at Zona Maco last February, Mexico City-based artist Rodrigo Ramírez is heading to New York to make his U.S. solo debut at Swivel Gallery. Titled While Being Plastic Membranes, the exhibition explores the visceral tension between body and psyche, pushing the boundaries of embodiment through a suite of dreamlike paintings and sculptures.

Taking cues from Baroque religious iconography, “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch and Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago, Ramírez delves into the idea of “cultural cannibalism” with play and intensity in hand. Just as societies absorb and reconfigure subcultures, his figures consume and mutate, existing in a liminal state of perpetual flux.

A knack for the unsettling sings through Ramírez’s flesh-colored forms, as they twist, contort and bleed into one another, caught in endless evolution. His canvases, cerebral and cinematic, create a sense of vertigo through light and shadow, as sculptures further extend this act of becoming into a three-dimensional reality. Distilling anatomical landscapes, anxieties of aging and ideas of self-perception, these works embrace the interplay of pain and pleasure because, as the gallery notes, “we kind of have no choice but to do so.”

While Being Plastic will be on view in New York from March 29 through April 26.

Swivel Gallery
555 Greenwich Street,
New York, NY 10014