Madragoa is happy to present at Art021 in the Approach Section, Booth P02, a new project by Rodrigo Hernández (Mexico City, 1983, lives and works in Lisbon and Mexico City), featuring nine new paintings on wooden board, presented in a specially-designed booth.

Working mostly with traditional media and techniques of art-making, including drawing, sculpture, and painting, Rodrigo Hernández is interested in the process of image-making in art history, from Meso-American iconography to contemporary art. His projects vary from studio-based creation of paintings, sculptures, and bas-reliefs to site-specific and research-oriented projects. He draws on a number of aesthetic references, which range from classical Japanese printmaking to fashion, and European modernism, among others, to develop a very personal formal vocabulary.

In the new series of paintings titled Pearl’s Bite, the artist focused on the relation between animate creatures - human or animal - and inanimate objects - like a leaf, a lamp, a mask or a snail - in the composition of the scene as well as in the role they play in the narration.

The scenes depicted create a tension and an interference between the parallel worlds of the living and the inanimate, as the objects seem to be the protagonists of the action and not the corollary of the event.

Rodrigo Hernández presented his works in numerous solo and group shows, such as Petit-Musc, Kunsthal Kohta, Helsinki (2021); Moon Foulard, Culturgest, Porto (2021);  Moon Foulard, Fidelidade Arte, Lisbon (2021); Pasado, Centro de Arte José de Guimarães, Guimarães (2021); What is it that has etched itself into you?, Madragoa, Lisbon (2020); Guests: Artists and Craftspeople, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul (2020); Pedigree, Galleria Campari, Milan (2019); A Moth to a Flame, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2019); ¿Qué escuchó cuando escucho el discurrir del tiempo?, Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros, Mexico City (2019); Who Loves You?, Kunsthalle, Winterthur (2019); Future Generation Prize @ Venice (2019); A Complete Unknown, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2019); Future Generation Prize @ Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv (2019); The Real World Does Not Take Flight, Pivô, São Paulo (2018); The Gourd & The Fish, SALTS, Basel (2018); Plasma, Madragoa, Lisbon (2017); Panoramas do Sul, Sesc_Videobrasil, Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo (2017); XII Bienal Femsa, Monterrey (2016); I Am Nothing, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2016); Every forest madly in love with the moon has a  highway crossing it from one side  to the other, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City (2016); El Pequeño Centro, Museo del Chopo, Mexico City (2015); Nothing is Solid, Kunsthalle, Basel (2015); What is the Moon?, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2014); A Sense of Possibility, Weingrüll, Karlsruhe (2013).