Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present Transient Nature, Rocío Rodríguez’s second solo show with the gallery. Rocío Rodríguez is a painter’s painter.
Ultimately, her work investigates the very nature of painting, breaking it down into its essence and investigating questions of the meaning and language of painting itself. Released from narrative or representation, the nature of Rodríguez's marks can be seen as answers in and of themselves to painting's creative problems. Rodríguez builds her compositions from the essential structural components of painting, with frenzied marks and imperfect forms.
Totem-like stacks and squares float freely or are anchored by their relationships to one another, bristling with an uneasy balance as if they may all collapse as the viewer studies the painting. These forms are nonrepresentational, but elevating their importance by putting them up on these implied pedestals makes them feel like they may be a stand-in for a figure or place.
In her latest work, Rodríguez is particularly interested in creating indeterminate space where images are not fixed, resulting in a disorderly plane where her forms are transient answers to ambiguous questions. These compositions elevate parts of a whole, and can be viewed as a pictorial examination of her visual vocabulary and process.
Rocío Rodríguez has exhibited widely throughout the country, including at the High Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and Marfa Contemporary. She was the Resident Artist at Marfa Contemporary, as well as at the American Academy of Art in Rome and the Fundación Valparaiso. Rodríguez has a BFA and MFA from the University of Georgia, Athens, and lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.