Raphael Montañez Ortiz

Raphael Montañez Ortiz was born in New York, United States, in 1934. He now lives and works in New Jersey.

Ritual, coincidence, duality, transcendence, humanism, acting, gesture, religion, and history are among the recurring themes the artist has explored throughout his practice. Since the beginning of his career, his principal concern has been the pursuit of the avant-garde. Working at the margins of cultural production, he created non-artistic objects—such as household items—which he would then discard through a process of deconstruction.

Although he was drawn to avant-garde movements such as Dada and Fluxus, it was his readings in psychology and anthropology that proved most influential. These disciplines formed the conceptual bridge between his early series of “archaeological findings” and his enduring interest in the perceptions and structures of the unconscious mind.