Miguel Angel Ríos

 

Ríos pairs a rigorous conceptual approach with a meticulously constructed, handmade aesthetic. Since the 1970s, he has made work about the concept of the "Latin American," using this idea as both an artistic strategy and a political problem. In the 1990s, he began making a series of maps which he carefully folded and pleated. Marking the 500th anniversary of the "discovery" of the Americas, the maps indicate long histories of power and colonial experience. Folding Borders provides the first comprehensive display of Ríos's maps series in the United States. 

 

Folding Borders also includes several of Ríos's recent video work. Since the early-2000s, Ríos has used the medium to create symbolic narratives about human experience, violence, and mortality. In his 2012 Untitled video from The Ghost of Modernity, Ríos references high Modernism--with direct nods to John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Donald Judd--in the midst of the Mexican desert. "Is this ghostly geometric figure a lens through which the world can be reinterpreted?" the artist asks. "Or is it the paradigmatic principle of modernist thought that organizes the world around it? Are we inside or outside the cube?"

 

Miguel Angel Ríos (b. 1943, San José Norte, Argentina) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires. In the 1970s, he moved to New York, and he currently divides his time between New York and Mexico. Ríos has had solo exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center (2012), the Museo Carrillo Gil (2011), the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2009), the Blaffer Art Museum (2007), Miami Art Museum (2006 and 2005), the Dallas Museum of Art (2006), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2005), Ludwing Forum für Internationale Kunst (2005), the Torino Triennale (2005), Artists Space, New York (2003), and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (1993).

 

His work is included in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Miami Art Museum; Patricia Cisneros Collection, New York; The Phoenix Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (MALBA), Buenos Aires.