ON VIEW til April 30- Second Nature — Cristina Lei Rodriguez

Cristina Lei Rodriguez

Second Nature

14 March – 30 April

NIA Gallery

V Přístavu 24, Praha 7

In her solo exhibition Second Nature, Rodriguez proposes renewed ways to view our natural world. Inspired by Miami’s oceans and tropical flora, the artist brings seemingly opposite forces together, merging human intervention with nature; reality with the imagined; and micro detail with macro landscapes. An expert of surfaces, expressed through assemblage paintings as well as scanning and print technology, Rodriguez invites closer study of nature through suspended moments. An immersion into the timeless present where real flora is assembled into an artist’s fiction, Rodriguez transports everyday understanding of our environment into the surreal imagined.

Do we have a second chance with nature?

Rodriguez asserts one needs to really look at something to care about it.

Paintings

Surfaces sparkle with encrusted crystals and pearls. Paint undulates with leaves and paraphernalia embed into the covered canvases. Seductive yet chaotic, contained yet expansive in their dynamism, Rodriguez’s paintings are gems to be discovered from afar and connected with from close.

Window artworks

Rodriguez’s awe-inspiring window coverings are abstract and immersive compositions of leaf and flower compositions translated through a flatbed scanner and expanded to human-size dimension. Both flat and interrupted yet colorfully deep in unconventional perspectives, Rodriguez pushes and pulls the viewer through a fantastical “Alice in Wonderland” trompe-l'œi. Familiar yet purposefully disorientating, the images are windows into a scanned ecology—a processed nature of titillating possibility and ominous warning.

View of NIA Gallery entrance with window print installation Ray of Light (Recorded January 7, 2021 at 12:27pm)

Cristina Lei Rodriguez

Landscape (Onyx and Gold), 2019

Acrylic, plastic, epoxy, gold leaf, glass, gold pigment on wood board

15 x 11.5 x 3 inches / 38 x 29 x 7.5 cm

Cristina Lei Rodriguez

Digging In (Fossils in Fuchsia), 2025

Acrylic, ink, plaster, repurposed plastic, beads, stained glass, fabric flower petals, micro crystals on wood board

25 x 19 x 5.5 inches / 63.5 x 48 x 14 cm

Cristina Lei Rodriguez

Building Balance (In Turquoise) , 2024

Acrylic, gouache, ink, turquoise stone, pink coral, quartz crystal, beads, stained glass, artist print on wood board

25.5 x 21.5 x 3 inches / 65 x 55 x 7.5 cm

Cristina Lei Rodriguez

Landscape (Iridescent Scarab) , 2019

Plastic, epoxy, dye, gold metallic powder, iridescent cellophane, silver leaf on canvas

16.5 x 12.5 x 2 inches / 42 x 32 x 5 cm

About

Cristina Lei Rodriguez is a Miami born artist to Cuban and Hawaiian parents. Working across disciplines, including painting, photography, sculpture, installation, and technology, Rodriguez is celebrated for mastering of materiality and conceptual juxtaposition to raise questions of human’s relationship to nature, pressing to our time. She has exhibited internationally atinstitutions and galleries including Serpentine Gallery (London), Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris, Miami), Team Gallery and Deitch Projects (both New York) and Blum and Poe (Los Angeles). Herwork is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), Pérez Art Museum Miami and The Bass Museum of Art (Miami), among others. She last showed work in Prague at Galerie Rudolfinum as part of the exhibition Uncertain States of America in 2004

Works available through NIA Gallery on Artsy

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