Rodrigo Hernández / Every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway that crosses it from one side to the other
Chris Sharp invites Rodrigo Hernández to kurimanzutto
February 6 - March 17, 2016
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 MesoAmerican
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.
Every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other by Rodrigo Hernández is the third of a series of six exhibitions to be curated by Chris Sharp for kurimanzutto. Taking place over the course of a year, the series will focus exclusively on emerging Mexican or Mexico-based artists. The intention of the project is to train a rigorous eye that sheds light upon some of the most active and challenging actors in the current art scene. kurimanzutto seeks to provide them with a unique platform within the local and international context, welcoming the development of a new generation of artists. Sharp’s selection will run as independent shows parallel to the gallery’s regular programming, maintaining their autonomy while productively resonating with each other.