Only one month to catch a beautiful monographic exhibition at Spike Island

Only one month to catch a beautiful monographic exhibition at Spike Island

Posted on: 20 Dec 2023

This major exhibition from acclaimed Colombian artist Ofelia Rodríguez (1946-2023) is the perfect way to support Spike Island whilst it is affected by Vauxhall Bridge’s closure.

 

Ofelia Rodriguez’s ‘Talking in Dreams’ exhibition runs at Spike Island until Sunday 14 January 2024.

 

Spike Island’s current headline exhibition brings together a selection of more than 70 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures from the artist, created across five decades. Rodríguez is influenced by memories of her native Barranquilla in Colombia, combining objects and images rich in symbolism to create works examining identity and gender.

 

This is a FREE entry exhibition, find out more on the gallery website.

 

 

After studying painting at Yale in the early 70s, Rodríguez moved to Paris to study etching before eventually settling in London in 1984. From her East London Studio, she began to develop deeply personal works inspired by childhood memories, incorporating tropical motifs evoking her coastal upbringing.

 

In her paintings, stuffed caimans, iguanas and lizards are suspended on colourful flat surfaces alongside cacti and bodily fragments likes hands, wounded hearts and photocopies of mechanically altered ears. Speaking about Colombia in her work, Rodríguez has said: “There is that sense of unreality…a feeling of being on the edge of the world, at its margin.”

 

She regularly used objects she collected from the street markets of Colombia and Mexico in her work, including masks, devotional images and plastic toys - sometimes placing these objects on canvas. In the late 70s, Rodríguez began to use these objects for her ‘Magic Boxes’, small brightly painted wooden boxes with objects inside – relic-like.

 

Rodríguez’s work is at once critical and humorous, using disparate material to explore the crossovers between the exotic and the popular, thus casting an analytical eye on her own background.

Ofelia Rodriguez’s ‘Talking in Dreams’ exhibition runs at Spike Island until Sunday 14 January 2024. This exhibition is FREE, find out more from the Spike Island website.

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Article by:

Stanley Gray

Stan is a born and bred Bristolian, recently graduated from studying English Literature in Sheffield. His passions are music and literature and he spends the majority of his time in venues all over the city, immersing himself in Bristol’s alternative music scene. A lifelong Bristol City fan, Stan’s Saturdays are spent watching his team both home and away.