Miguel Rodriguez Sepulveda
Monterrey , Nuevo León
Artista visual nacido en Tampico Tamaulipas México en 1971
Message
Miguel Rodríguez Sepúlveda’s artistic practice investigates the symbolic transformation of objects, materials, and systems of power. Working from the tension between potentiality and impossibility, his work examines how the symbols that structure social life (economic, political, and cultural) erode, collapse, or are reconfigured, revealing connections between collective memory, the construction of value, normalized violence, and the fragility of shared imaginaries.
Through processes of wear, fading, repetition, and material reconfiguration, Rodríguez Sepúlveda works with objects and images charged with symbolic value, activating critical readings of the ways in which societies produce, sustain, or transform their points of reference. His work opens spaces for reflection on the historical, social, and affective tensions that traverse bodies, territories, and public space.
His practice is primarily developed through sculpture, installation, and object-based work, while also incorporating video, photography, and situated actions. In several projects, he has approached public space as a site of memory, dispute, and symbolic negotiation, understanding the artwork as a device capable of activating collective experiences, ethical questions, and critical forms of engagement with the present.
He has presented more than thirty solo exhibitions, including “Fuga y Entropía”, a survey of his career held at MARCO Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, in 2023. He will present “Corpografías de América Latina”, a forthcoming solo exhibition at MACG Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, scheduled for 2027. He has also participated in more than two hundred group exhibitions in Mexico and abroad, including “Poligráfica Puerto Rico / Bajo Presión – Under Pressure” at the Antiguo Arsenal de la Marina, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and “El Dorado / de la Utopía al Mito Contemporáneo” at Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico.
He has received more than twenty-five awards, grants, and production supports, including the Fundación/Colección Jumex Sponsorship Program, artistic production support from the Prince Claus Fund in the Netherlands, and his appointment as a member of Mexico’s SNCA Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte for the 2024–2027 period.
His work is part of public and private collections, including MUAC Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Ciudad de México; Fundación / Colección JUMEX, México; Fundación Televisa, México; Colección Perez Simón, España-México; Museu de Pollença / Ajuntament de Pollença, Mallorca España; Museo de la Cancillería, Ciudad de México; ONG Colección Organización Nelson Garrido, Caracas Venezuela; Pinacoteca del Estado de Nuevo León, Monterrey NL México and MARCO Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Monterrey NL México.
In 2021, one of his works was included in “MUAC: One Hundred Works”, a publication that brings together works considered key references within Mexico’s collective thought and imagination.
ArtFacts, the British platform dedicated to the analysis of international artistic careers, ranks him among the Top 100 artists in Mexico.
- Updated CV: http://www.miguelrodriguezsepulveda.com/cv/
- Texts on the work: https://mrs.tallermultinacional.net/textos/
- ArtFacts: https://artfacts.net/artist/miguel-rodriguez-sepulveda/125924
DARK FOREST (BOSQUE OBSCURO)
Inspired by the “Dark Forest” hypothesis, this series of paintings interweaves the Fermi Paradox with the ancestral memory of the Cave of Hands. Using machetes as stencils, the works rewrite the ancient imprint “I was here” and transform it into a collective statement —“We were here”— reversing silence into a strategy of survival.
Statement
- In the past years my work has been a constant investigation of the social and political context in which I am immersed. I have approached this subject mainly from a scientific or mathematical point of view, constructing parallelisms between physical principles such as Newton's first law or the law of the conservation of the energy, and the violence generated in the asymmetries on life acts. My work methodology tends to go towards a mixture of the scientific method with the practices or/and strategies of the so called conceptual art, looking for an efficient way to present these findings to the viewer, confronting him to his own conditioning as a member of his own society..
I am sure that art, follows the same manners as some of the basic physiological needs of the human body, aiming to preserve the survival of the species by pondering upon a wider view of our own possibilities.