2020
2020
2020
2018
2018
2018
That’s how it all began. Or that was the beginning of the end: a man left his office, paused in the middle of the street, surrendered every single muscle in his body and muttered: I’m done.
2017
2017
2017
The artist’s recent work is a sort of deconstruction of his own poetics, which goes from a certain oneiric aesthetics of the landscape to a critical/naturalist aesthetics of the image.
2017
2015
2015
2012
Ruiz journeyed around West Limerick for two weeks, his camera moving amongst streets, fields, yards and inside an ancient ring fort with an eerie, often surreal direction. His wanderings led him to find the proverbial road to nowhere, a mile-long tarmacadam lane built for an unrealized industrial estate, ending abruptly into a field.
2011
“En esta serie me interesaba jugar con la lógica del monumento y la relación que éste tiene con la noche, lo que se define dentro de la narrativa de una comunidad y sus hitos históricos.”
2011
The artist portrays landscapes that appear to be staged. The images are constructed with a tangible corporeality based on volumes and shadows illuminated with stage lighting.
2011
2011
Viendo que el ver me da muerte; una muerte imaginada, ficticia, que ocurre solo en el lenguaje. La muerte y la mirada se entrelazan. Las imágenes se construyen desde esta realidad de unión funesta. Pues estas son siempre el pasado, las imágenes son memoria, (monere) monumento.
2011
The photos of abandoned and crumbling houses suggest an ambiguity between architecture and sculpture, between ruin and monument. These works appear to create a tension between the places where they were built and the places we once remembered. And in that passage between origin and memory, Oswaldo Ruiz makes us intuit the fleeting and elusive whiff of catastrophe.
2009
Las fotografías de Oswaldo Ruiz nos presentan la consolidación desde la nada de elementos tecnológicamente ordenados que no permiten su integración a un lugar definido y adecuado para que el alma humana pueda quedarse. Al mismo tiempo, confieren a estructuras que encontramos habitualmente el carácter sublime de las formas artísticas del barroco, mezcla de unión mística con el infinito y de horror ante el vacío que se abre.
2005
The photographic translation of Oswaldo Ruiz is a geopolitical provocation, but it is also a photographic irruption. An impossible translation of the gaze in which the interlaced body gets in between.
2003
www.instagram.com/oswaldorruiz
Patricia Conde Galería
Gral. Juan Cano 68
San Miguel Chapultepec I Secc.
Mexico City, 11850, Mexico
T: +52 (55) 5290 6345
info@patriciacondegaleria.com
www.patriciacondegaleria.com
Heart Ego
Lázaro Garza Ayala 511, Casco Urbano, 66230
San Pedro Garza García, N.L., Mexico
T: +52 (81) 8448 9408
Oswaldo Ruiz was born in Monterrey, Nuevo León, in 1977. An early interest in space led him to study architecture at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (UANL), a profession that he quickly abandoned in order to focus on photography. Interested in broadening his understanding of the image, he completed graduate studies in psychoanalysis, philosophy and art history at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Later, in order to advance his explorations of visual media, he enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at Central Saint Martins College in London. From 2015 and 2018 he was the studio assistant of the Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide.
Using the darkness of night as material for his photographic work, between 2004 and 2012 he took pictures of different places along the highways around Monterrey: gas stations, convenience stores, bus stops and strange, illuminated buildings. This led him to photograph the demolished houses in the municipality of Anáhuac, a border area where his family was originally from and that had since been abandoned because of migration to the U.S. after NAFTA. Along these same lines, and as a result of artistic residencies in Dublin, Berlin and Santiago de Chile, he developed different projects with which, in a sort of archeology of the everyday, he explored the dualities of light and darkness, consciousness and the unconscious, life and death, in his series of medieval towers, ephemeral constructions and anti-monuments. The last of these series, about quiotes (the flower produced by the agave plant before it dies), was shot in the state of Oaxaca. One of his last projects Welcome to Paradise (2013-2017), shown in Centro de la Imagen in 2017 and Fototeca de Nuevo León in 2018, he portrays different enclaves of Latin American cities to deconstruct the idea of the city and extract images of some archetypes that inhabit it, where a dialogue between ruins and science fiction spaces is created. For this project he photographed from the port of Valparaíso in Chile to the Dry port of Jalisco, across Mexico City, Monterrey, the zone of The plain in flames of Rulfo, Barra de Navidad, Colombia and Dominican Republic.
He has had over a dozen solo exhibitions, including: Nostalgia de catástrofes (Patricia Conde gallery, 2018), Welcome to Paradise (Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City 2017 and Fototeca de Nuevo León 2018); Espacio que cabe entre dos tiempos (Galería Heart Ego, Monterrey, 2016); Anudamientos (Museo de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City, 2013); Frecuencia natural (Galería Luis Adelantado, Mexico City, 2011); Oswaldo Ruiz 2002-2009 (Fototeca Nuevo León, Monterrey, 2010) and Last Night (Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2010).
He has also participated in over fifty group shows, including: Constitución mexicana 1917- 2017. Imágenes y voces (Galería del Palacio Nacional, Mexico City, 2017); Tlaxotlali: Alternancia de ciclos (Casa del Lago, UNAM, Mexico City, 2017); the XII FEMSA Biennial / Poéticas del decrecimiento, ¿cómo vivir mejor con menos? (Centro de las Artes, Parque Fundidora, Monterrey, 2016); Develar y detonar. Fotografía en México ca. 2015 (Centro Cibeles, Madrid and Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City, 2015); Existe todo lo que tiene nombre (Camera Works, San Francisco, California, 2015); Dirty, Poorly Dressed and Filled with Love (Erehwon Center for the Arts, Quezon City, Philippines, 2013); El vértigo de la abundancia (Casa del Lago, unam, Mexico City, 2013); Basado en una historia verdadera (Museo Salvador Allende, Santiago de Chile, 2012); Umbrales (Instituto de México en París, Paris, 2010); Registro 02. Mirar por segunda vez (Museo marco, Monterrey, 2009) and the XIII Bienal de Fotografía (Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, 2009).
His work has received awards both nationally and internationally, including the Acquisition prize of the XVIII Photography Biennial of Centro de al Imagen (2018), SIVAM prize (2006), the Petrobras-Buenos Aires Photo Prize (2006), and the Acquisition Prize at the 2nd Bienal de Artes Visuales de Yucatán (2004). Recently he published the book Welcome to Paradise (La Caja de Cerillos Ediciones and Fundación BBVA Bancomer, Mexico City, 2017). His work has also been published in many books, magazines and catalogues, and shown at the international fairs Madrid Foto (2011 and 2012) and Paris Photo (2006 and 2007). Since 2018 he is a Member of the National System of Art Creator, of FONCA.
Master in Fine Arts, Central Saint Martins College, London, UK.
Postgraduate courses in Contemporary Art and Psychoanalysis. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain.
Architecture, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Monterrey, Mexico.
Member of the National System of Art Creators, of the System of Support for Creation and Cultural Projects, Ministry of Culture, Mexico.
Acquisition prize in the XVIII Photography Biennial at Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Mexico.
Member of the National System of Art Creators, FONCA, Mexico.
FORCA Northeast grant to do a residency in Santiago de Chile.
Special Mention on the XIII Photo Biennial, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Mexico.
First Prize SIVAM, by the International Society of Values of Mexican Art, Mexico City, Mexico.
Second Prize Petrobras-Buenos Aires Photo 2006.
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Special Mention on the VII Monterrey Biennial FEMSA, Monterrey, Mexico.
Acquisition Prize in the II National Biennial of Visual Arts of Yucatán, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.
First Prize in the XXIV Reseña de la Plástica Nuevoleonesa, Monterrey, Mexico.
Museo de Arte de Sonora (MUSAS), Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico.
Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, Mexico.
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey (MARCO).
Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA.
Fototeca de Nuevo Léon, Monterrey, Mexico.
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, UK.
FEMSA Collection, Monterrey, Mexico.