Elio Rodriguez
Bio
Elio Rodriguez was born in Havana 1966, he now lives and works in Spain. In 1994, he completed his arts studies at Havana’s Higher Institute of Art (ISA). He has been awarded Art Residencies at Hutchins Institute, Harvard University, at Mattress Factory Art Museum, Pittsburg, and given lectures at Harvard University, NYU, and Swarthmore College. His artwork has been displayed in several solo and group shows around the world. He is in public collections such as National Arts Museum, Cuba; Jersey City State University; Foundation AMBA, Brazil; Hainaut City Hall, Belgium; Peggy Crafitz Collection; Center For Cuban Studies, New York; Von Christierson Collection, London; Shelley & Donald Rubin Collection, New York; W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University.
Statement
All my work in general deals with the question of identity, understood as the system of judgments about a person, culture or phenomenon. This question is generally treated from the prism of Caribbean popular culture, using the humor and elements of this culture, and such cliches formed about the culture, that when it comes from them, it builds images that simultaneously incarnate that reality, and question it. The ambivalence of genres is also a topic that is near to me, a game of illusions with the spectator, the doubt in the identity of a concept or an image, the phenomena that pretend to be one thing, but that are really something else or both at the same time. Although my work has a conceptual root, where the idea conditions formal elements; the sensory sense, the sensations that emanate from the forms of my work are fundamental to them.
