ARTIST RECEPTION:
Saturday, April 26, 2–5 PM
Seven Sisters is proud to present Daniel Rios Rodriguez: Sweet Fire, a solo exhibition opening on Saturday, April 26, from 2 to 5 p.m. This show marks the artist's first commercial gallery presentation in his home state of Texas in a lead-up to his upcoming solo exhibition at Ruby City, San Antonio, TX, curated by Elyse Gonzales in Fall 2025. Deeply personal and poetically charged, Sweet Fire introduces a new body of work that combines Rodriguez's singular vision, weaving abstraction, symbolism, and materiality into a celebration of identity, memory, and place.
Born in Killeen, Texas, and based in San Antonio, Rodriguez has steadily built an international reputation for his idiosyncratic paintings—small, tactile works mounted on hand-carved wooden panels that push the boundary between painting and object. In Sweet Fire, the artist continues to mine symbolic potential. Fire is a metaphor throughout the exhibition for transformation, resistance, and sacred continuity. Another common motif is the virgula, a tendril-like form that expresses communication in its maximum expression, used in pre-Hispanic times to represent speech and ideas. Considered a sacred symbol, it also means "what flows," like water, wind, the sky, and even the voice and thought itself.
The exhibition's title references the warmth of familial bonds, the spark of creative intuition, and the heat of cultural legacy. With reverence and resolve, the artist channels the lived experiences of the Hispanic and Latino-American diaspora through a visual language that is as lyrical as it is rugged. "My paintings are about survival and devotion," Rodriguez says. "They come from a need to connect with ancestry and ritual, and also from a desire to hold onto beauty in the face of chaos."
Rodriguez's practice is a testament to persistence and invention. Using found materials, rope, nails, stones, and vividly textured paint, he creates topographically layered compositions that pulse with raw energy and spiritual intensity. At the heart of this show is a profound meditation on the Mexican-American experience—rooted in the soil of Texas but shaped by displacement, labor, and longing. Rodriguez's works don't as much narrate a specific history but conjure a landscape of feeling, memory, and myth. They speak to a dual identity at once personal and universal, forged in the friction and fusion of two worlds.
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 Chianti 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.
