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.

Rodrigo Hernández (Mexico City, 1983) studied visual arts in the la Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City and he completed his masters at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, in Karlsruhe, Germany, in the class of artist Silvia Bächli. In 2014 he concluded a postgraduate program in Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, The Netherlands. He currently lives and works in Basel, Switzerland as a resident in the Laurenz-Haus Stiftung.

His work has been shown in Kunsthalle Basel; Museo del Chopo, Mexico City; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts, New York; NuMU - Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Guatemala City; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Supplement Gallery, London; Parallel, Oaxaca; FRAC Marseille; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Kunsthaus Baselland; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunstverein Freiburg and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, amongst others.

Chris Sharp (United States, 1974) is a writer and independent curator based in Mexico City, where he and the Mexican artist Martin Soto Climent run the project space Lulu.

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.