Rodrigo Hernandez
Motion Pause (2023)
Often using classical media and techniques of art making, Hernández is interested in the constitutive movement of art and image making. His work Motion Pause (2023) is a hand hammered stainless steel relief depicting a figure entering another dimension, or emerging from one place and transitioning into another. Between two curtains, the character is seen in a moment of suspension – leaving backstage or in between acts. This theater image is a metaphor for a transitional process that, as the title suggests, has been paused. Speaking of moments of change, this work relates to the artist’s 2023 large stainless steel installation The Flux of Things on the facade of Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover. Using a traditional technique such as Repoussé, the artist builds a contrast between the solidity of the stainless steel sheets and the tenderness of the moments that are inscribed on them.
photography: Andrea Rossetti, courtesy of Chert Lüdde
Rodrigo Hernández Biography
Rodrigo Hernández (b. 1983, Mexico City) lives and works in Mexico City. He studied at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2014) and obtained a BA at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe in 2013.
Hernández’s highly idiosyncratic visual vocabulary invites, in a similar manner as fiction, the suspension of belief and the adoption of imaginative perception. Each of his installations is constructed as a rebus of various sources, such as poetry, philosophy, narrative and dreams. The myriad of historical and aesthetic references in his work serves not as a statement in itself, but rather as an experiment on synthesis, which the viewer navigates through like a cosmos of possibilities. Hernández’s paintings, reliefs, sculptures and installations operate like machines for flexing the imagination, triggering encounters between imagery and meaning-making, and between forms and their environments.
Hernández was awarded with several international awards and grants, including the Campari Art Prize, 2018; Cité International des Arts Paris, 2016; BBVA-Museo Carrillo Gil and Jóvenes Creadores, 2016; National Fund of the Arts-FONCA, 2016; Laurenz-Haus Stiftung, Basel and Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, 2015; Jan Van Eyck Academie Stipendium, 2013; Graduiertenstipendium Landesstiftung Baden-Württemberg, 2013; DAAD-Preis zur Jahresausstellung, AdbK Karlsruhe, 2012, among others. He was a finalist of the Future Generation Art Prize in 2019 and attended the Istanbul Modern residencies in 2020; Pivô, São Paulo in 2018; the Residency Unlimited, New York, 2013; Christoph Merian Stiftung, 2013 and the Salzburg Sommerakademie, 2013.