Raúl de Nieves

Raúl De Nieves, Installation view of Raúl De Nieves: Eternal Return and the Obsidian Heart, 2020, MoCA, North Miami. Photo: Zachary Balber, courtesy of the artist, MoCA, North Miami, and Company Gallery, New York.

Lower Level Galleries
September 30, 2023 — September 01, 2024
Across painting, sculpture, and performance, Raúl de Nieves fuses aesthetic traditions of Mexican craft, queer club culture, and religious iconography. His densely textured works are steeped in symbolism and personal mythology and are often evocative of ritual and celebration. Themes of self-actualization, transformation, and cycles of death and rebirth recur throughout de Nieves’s work. The artist’s reference points are wide-ranging and include his Mexican heritage and immigrant experience, Catholicism, the Tarot, the canon of European art, drag performance, and punk music. Often using mundane or castoff materials, de Nieves revisions and revalues the commonplace to create dazzling new forms that conjure a continual process of becoming and animate the multiplicity of the self.
At the Henry, de Nieves will create a site-specific installation that turns the museum’s South Gallery into a container of colored light. Using acetate and tape, he will make a series of faux stained-glass story panels for the three immense skylights that span the gallery. The panels will transmit the transitional natural light to create a kaleidoscopic, continually changing atmosphere inside the gallery. In conversation with the physical subterranean qualities of the gallery, de Nieves’ installation considers the abundance of life in the cultural and social underground and the potential of building alternative worlds by recasting who and what narratives matter. Performances will punctuate the run of the exhibition, filling the space with sound, movement, and costume to generate a communal ritual experience.

Artist Bio

Born 1983 in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Raúl de Nieves has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in North America and internationally. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Georgia, among other institutions. Additionally, he has participated in group exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the High Line, New York; the K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and numerous other venues. De Nieves has staged performances at institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and MoMA PS1, Queens. He has been an artist in residence at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and Fountainhead, Miami, as well as a fellow at the Joan Mitchell Foundation. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
CREDITS

Raúl de Nieves is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator at the Henry Art Gallery, and Risa Puleo, Independent Curator.