MIGUEL ANGEL RIOS

Born 1953 in Catamarca, Argentina. Lives and works in New York, USA and Mexico City, Mexico.

Miguel Angel Rios, Crudo, 2008 (video still), single-channel video, colour, sound, 3:14 mins. Courtesy the artist and Evo Gallery, Santa Fe

Born in the north-west of Argentina in Catamarca, Miguel Angel Rios has lived and worked between New York and Mexico since the mid-1970s, preserving a long-standing focus on his Latin American heritage. Rather than utilising popular national imagery in his art, Rios was initially more influenced by formalist ideas. At moments, his work showed affinities with the poetics of repetition of such Minimalist artists as Walter de Maria and Carl Andre, yet it also availed itself of a rich, complex range of social and political references.

At the outbreak of the Gulf War in the early 1990s, Rios responded by making a series of 40-plus works, the most striking being those in which he used cardboard Federal Express boxes as frames for groups of small cubes, also made of cardboard, arranged like tesserae in a mosaic. Each cube was painted with the flag of one of the warring countries so that when seen together they looked like pieces in a board game. Using these jostled grids of colour as a background, Rios added menacing black marks; at times the marks represented the outlines of Iraq or Kuwait, in other instances they were simply nebulous configurations that represented the smoke of burning oil wells.

In recent years, Rios work has reflected a return to Latin American culture and tradition as a paradigm for much wider experiences. In a series of video works titled Crudo (shown here at the Biennale of Sydney), Matambre and White Suit (all 2008), he has choreographed a performance in a black box, translating symbolic elements of Argentine culture into an examination of how power is dispensed throughout the world. Each work features a pack of starving, wild dogs who surround a man dressed in a white suit who dances the malambo.

This dance was historically performed by men as a way of displaying their macho ‘gaucho’ skills; the quick, rhythmic tapping of the man’s feet and the boleadoras, in which, in this case, the traditional leather hard rock balls have been replaced by chunks of meat, are swung through the air to provoke the dogs to become increasingly aggressive. Gauchos actually used boleadoras as a type of lasso to capture cattle or game by tying their legs together but today they are more a picturesque element in Argentine folk dance. With rapid editing and changes of perspective and tempo between the man and the dogs, the scenes become increasingly desperate, even masochistic, in a tense and pessimistic allegory of the diminished lives of both master and masses.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 ‘Dangerous Cartography’, Evo Gallery, Santa Fe, USA
2008 ‘White Suit’, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin, Germany
2007 ‘On the Edge’, Annie Gawlak Art Gallery, Washington DC, USA
2006 ‘A Morir’, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA
2006 ‘Aquí’, Milan Antonio Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘MONITAUR’, Aspen Museum of Art, Aspen, USA
2009 ‘Foreign Exchange’, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand
2009 ‘Yente – Prati’, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
2009 ‘Collectores XXIV ’, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, USA
2009 Maison Europeene de la Photographie, Paris, France

Selected Bibliography

Elizabeth Cook-Romero, ‘Top of the World’, Pasatiempo, August 2007
David Hatchett, ‘Miguel Angel Rios: Multiple Video Event’, NY ARTS Magazine, January– February 2004
Anne Martens, ‘Miguel Angel Rios’, Flash Art, January–February 2005
Raphael Rubinstein, ‘A Serious Gamer’, Art in America, June–July, 2005
Terrie Sultan (ed.), AQUI: Miguel Angel Rios, exhibition catalogue, Blaffer Gallery, Houston, 2007