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 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.