Rodrigo Hernandez. The Gourd & The Fish

Working with the most classical media and techniques of art making, including drawing, sculpture and painting, Rodrigo Hernández’s practice interrogates the nature of art, the divisions that characterise it, and their relationship to contemporary epistemology.

For all the apparent naïveté of his work, it takes nothing for granted, asking what a drawing is or a figure or even the moon. He draws on a number of aesthetic references, which range from Meso- American culture to European modernism, among others, to develop a formal vocabulary that is all his own. After a residency in Basel between 2015 and 2016, Hernandez participated to Courtesy of SALTS, an exhibition presenting artists’ editions made in support of the newly-funded Kunstverein. The idea then emerged to work site-specifically on ideas around cultural displacement, often mixing and confronting references from his own country to the ones where the artist temporarily stays.