NYAB Event - Elio Rodriguez “Puzzled”

Elio Rodriguez “Puzzled”

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel

This event has ended.

532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel for the opening reception of Puzzled, Elio Rodriguez’ first solo exhibition in New York City. The show is on view until May 9th and will coincide with his exhibition On Guard at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for Afro-Latin Studies and at our gallery’s booth at Context Art New York at Pier 94, May 4-8, 2016.

On view in Chelsea will be the artist’s large scale soft sculptures and the photography based collage works at Hutchins Center, Cambridge.

Elio experiments with the construction of the intimacy of interior and exterior spaces, all things carnal and decorative, functional and artistic, manufactured and native. His soft sculptures reimagine familiar forms using, in abundant measure, plant and carnal shapes, juxtaposed against sundry objects, metal screws, lace corsets, chains, belts, wire, filament, pins — with results that are pictorial equivalents of familiar concepts and concerns.

In his stuffed, massive soft sculptures, loaded messages about stereotypes, sexual or racial or otherwise, are hidden within exaggerated, provocative rendering of the mysteries of organic, invasive fauna, entangled in space by which a far-out untamed nature is introduced. Lush, ritualistic, magical, multiple perspectives serve as metaphors for the state of his own Afro-Cuban-ism coalesced with the state of the female, as might be interpreted through the popular discourse in our modern times.

Elio’s work may veer into a kind of kitsch, but he does so magnificently in the most unlikely, playful, witty, voluptuous, sensory, sensual ways.

Elio Rodriguez, (Cuba 1966) lives in Spain, he graduated from Higher Institute of Art (ISA), Havana in 1989. He has had solo and group shows in Latin America, Europe and the US. He was awarded the Hutchins Fellowship at Harvard in 2015. His artworks are part of important public and private collections, including National Arts Museum of Cuba; Von Christierson Collection, London; Shelley & Donald Rubin Collection, New York; Peggy Cooper Crafritz Collection, Washington DC; W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University.