Daniel Rios Rodriguez

Installation view, "Serpentine Dream," Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, 2021
"The incorporation of objects and materials into my work was not only a way to overcome my inabilities as a painter, it was also a way of getting to the point. Why paint snake skin if I can incorporate one? Why paint stones and feathers if they are the very things I pick up along my excursions?"

-Daniel Rios Rodriguez
B. 1978, KILEEN, TX

LIVES AND WORKS IN SAN ANTONIO, TX

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Daniel Rios Rodriguez in his studio

Daniel Rios Rodriguez makes intimate and exuberant semi-figurative paintings that combine images from nature with fantastical visions. The artist works on a small scale, building coarse layers of impasto upon homemade panels in irregular shapes (uneven rectangles, ovals, starburst forms with jagged edges). Often these assemblages bear impromptu frames, built by the artist with found wood, frayed strips of rope, nails or copper wire, introducing a collaged element. “Daniel Rios Rodriguez’s quirky, unassuming paintings don’t fall into any easily recognisable niche or category”, writes Art in America’s Kyle MacMillan. Though his work is informed by the canon of European Modernism and art historical painting, the artist looks equally towards peripheral figures like the visionary Texan painter Forrest Bess

Rios Rodriguez’s subject matter is mostly derived from nature. Many paintings provide an obscured and abstracted version of the artist’s personal experiences – vivid vignettes enriched by a cosmic colour palette and bold, decorative flourishes. Other works filter the time-honoured genres of still life, landscape and memento mori through the kaleidoscopic lens of American folk art: paintings of birds, rivers, flora and fauna are embellished with dried ears of wheat, fragments of rock, feathers or seashells. This perverse and unsettling treatment of the traditional subjects of European painting, enshrined with organic detritus, imbues Rios Rodriguez’s paintings with an almost talismanic quality.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez (b. 1978, Killeen, TX) lives and works in San Antonio, TX, and received his MFA in Painting from Yale in 2007. He has sought to use his canvas as a space to chart and evolve the personal history of 21st-century Mexican American experience in relation to place. Rodriguez has had solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; Feuilleton, Los Angeles; Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL; Artpace, San Antonio; Lulu, Mexico City; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2015), and White Columns, New York (2011), among others. Group exhibitions include Various Small Fires, Dallas; X Museum, Beijing; Camden Arts Centre, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Galeria Fortes D'aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; and Roberts & Tilton Gallery, Los Angeles, among numerous others.

Rodriguez was a 2018 Artist in Residence at the Chinati Foundation, a printmaking resident at the Wingate Studio in New Hampshire (2017), and a 2013 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award recipient. Over the past fifteen years, he has supported diverse student populations, from painting at the college level, working with Veterans and first-generation college students as faculty at a federally-designated Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), and as a graduate-level Guest Critic at UTSA. His work was featured in the exhibition "Right Here, Right Now: San Antonio" at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2018 and is included in the public collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art, he has a forthcoming solo survey show at Ruby City, San Antonio, TX in fall 2025.
Past Exhibitions

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Reincarnation of a Lovebird, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY, 2023
Installation view, "Southwestern Gothic," Feuilleton, Los Angeles, CA, 2020
Bruisers: Daniel Rios Rodriguez,

Artpace, San Antonio, TX, 2019

“They are people that are tough and pushing through the world. The paintings are pushing and fighting their way through something. Many of them do undergo a lot of heavy hitting and burning and throwing across the floor. They’ll sit here in a pile for a long time, and then they come out. They have a life and lifespan that is bruised.”

—Daniel Rios Rodriguez

Much of what Rios Rodriguez uses is found, as he likes the “reconstitution of materials.” Terracotta drainage trays and old wood possess a past life that is evident in the worked, impasto surfaces and custom frames. Despite their diminutive appearance, his works are durable and resilient, and they make their way through the hardships of existence, much like human beings do. For Rios Rodriguez, he is creating a total work, frame and all. In his own words, “a lot of painting functions as a surface and image to look at.” It’s not just the works themselves that are so well-considered, but also the conversation that happens between the works while being made in his studio. He works simultaneously on multiple paintings at once generating more of a rhythmic body of work rather than isolated paintings. This consideration extends well into the gallery space, from the amount of light to the ambient sound in the space in order to recreate a warmer environment reminiscent of his studio. This is one among many reasons his works require time spent with them, and there is an intimacy forged between the work and the viewer.

The works in Bruisers toe the line between the organic and the geometric. One can make out snakes, leaves, landscapes, and natural elements, but Rios Rodriguez abstracts them just enough to present as enigmatic symbols for something much larger than us. His layered images extend beyond their literal meanings into territories like life, rebirth, and what it means to be an artist and a human in the past, present, and future.

-Artpace Press Release for Bruiser, Artpace, 2019

Artpace
Works
- Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Untitled, 2023
Exhibitions
- DANIEL RIOS RODRIGUEZ
  SWEET FIRE 26 Apr - 7 Jun 2025
  
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Press
- Daniel Rios Rodriguez
  Kyle MacMillan, Art in America, March 24, 2016