Omar Rodriguez-Graham

Mexico, 1978

Curriculum

Rodriguez-Graham graduated with a BA from Drew University in Madison, N.J., U.S.A. in 2003 and received his MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, P.A., U.S.A. in 2005. He has twice been a recipient of FONCA’s Beca de Jovenes Creadores fellowship. Among the residencies he has atended are The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2013) and The Banff Centre (2010). He will be a resident at Casa Wabi in 2017.

His work has been shown both individually and collectively in México, the United States, Europe and South America. His work is held in private and public collections in Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, Peru, Singapore, the United States of America and Venezuela among which are included The JUMEX Collection, Mexico; Museum of Modern Art, México; SPACE Collection (formerly known as Sayago & Pardon) USA and the Jorge Pérez Collection, USA.

Rodriguez-Graham’s work is the result of an ongoing exploration of painting’s inherent language; hoping to find the meeting point between the recognizable and the abstract. His work begins with the use of recognizable images as an armature upon which to place marks: traces of the event of painting. Together, these marks construct a figure that acts not as a replacement or stand-in of this initial figuration, but as a memory. A amalgamation between the translation of a recollection and the construction of something new.

Within his recent work, Rodriguez-Graham has tackled a group of paintings based on physical constructions; sculptures that present a purely painterly experience. Which upon being re-presented upon a canvas, suggesting a new reality that presents a coexistence between the recognizable and the abstract.