ROCÍO RODRÍGUEZ | At The Edge of The Day
Exhibition Dates: January 22 - March 20
Sandler Hudson Gallery is pleased to announce the latest body of work from visual artist Rocío Rodríguez entitled At the Edge of the Day. Rodríguez’s past decade of exhibited work has possessed a diaristic progression, marking time in tandem with the artist’s own state of mind. After experiencing the transformative light of Marfa, Texas while at her 2014 artist residency, the painter began to reference the constant conversation between earth and sky, depicting fragments of her surroundings through abstract forms. Not yet ready to embrace landscape fully, Rodríguez maintained a highly abstract visual language that focused on the purity of form rather than specific pictoral representation.
Five years later and at the end of the journey with her previous work, Rodríguez takes to Taos, New Mexico, once again in need of an unparalleled view of the sky and land. Here the artist opens an investigative "return to nature" in terms of her work and confronts the long established subject matter--- the landscape. Through At the Edge of the Day, Rodríguez introduces images that represent the space and time during the transition from day into night. This period of the day is intrinsically short-lived; it vanishes as it begins to unfold. Rodríguez is attracted to the transient aspect that this moment in time offers as well as the metaphorical implications that it can hold. As opposed to being supported by art historical allusions to past images, the exhibited work simply consists of imagery direct from the landscape. The landscapes of At the Edge of the Day are variously presented. Some are fragmented or juxtaposed, along with abstract rectangles that speak to an “in between” place, that can serve as a marker for what something is as it is experienced and as it is imagined.
ROCÍO RODRÍGUEZ was born in Cuba and came to the US in 1961. She received both her MFA and BFA degrees from the University of Georgia. Rodríguez has been in over thirty solo exhibitions in contemporary art centers, museums, and private galleries and has participated in over ninety national curated exhibitions. She is the recipient of various national and regional awards among them Anonymous Was a Woman Award 2018, the Artadia Atlanta 2011 award, a Cintas Fellowship, an Affiliated Fellowship Award at the American Academy in Rome, Italy and two SAF/NEA Fellowships. She has had two major retrospectives of her work, Divergent Fictions: Selected Works from 1988-2012 at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, GA, 2012 and a retrospective of her drawings, Thirty Years on Paper at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in 2019. In 2014, she was awarded an Artist Residency at the Marfa Contemporary in Marfa, Texas where she also had a solo exhibition in July of 2015. Ms. Rodríguez’s work is in numerous international private collections and public national collections among them the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA, the Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, ALA, the Macon Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, GA, the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, FLA, The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, GA and the Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. Her work has been featured in two books; Out of the Rubble and NOPLACENESS: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape. She is represented by Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta, GA and by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in NYC.
“For centuries, artists have sought out the natural world. Since the 19th century, American artists have traveled to the Western part of the country to experience the expansiveness and the untouched quality of the landscape and ignite in their work a sense of light, nature and place. When Rocío Rodríguez was fortunate to be an artist in residence in Marfa, Texas, she found herself turning to nature as had many of her great predecessors.”
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“Rocío Rodríguez, an established Cuban American painter, is best known for her abstract images of stacks of squares shimmering and vibrating with exquisitely controlled color, rendered with a great variety of energetic and distinctive marks and edges, synergized within each piece. It is a surprise to see the artist plunge into the realm of landscape painting in her current solo show at Sandler Hudson Gallery, At the Edge of the Day. Rodríguez’s masterful technical skills are evident in this new body of representational work, where she depicts monumental fields of open sky and landscape in black and white monochrome paintings, made with oils on canvas. Her willingness to explore an interest in the landscape with great focus and dedication is a refreshing attitude in a discipline that tends to encourage a branding of one’s style. If Gerhard Richter can jump from representation to abstraction, so can Rocío Rodríguez.”
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