In collaboration with K Contemporary, the Emmanuel Art Gallery will be engulfed by Ikebana (2019), a monumental inflatable sculpture by Cuban-born, Mexico City-based artist Angel Ricardo Ricardo Rios, with a selection of his paintings on view on the second floor. It is both exuberant and contstricted (and perhaps constricting). In its new setting, this abstract, organic form swallows Emmanuel's exhibition space, humbling viewers seeking to approach and circumnavigate it. Its hubris is simultaneously awe-inspiring, fanciful, and at times disconcerting. Is it friend or foe; menacing or playful? Is it conquering the gallery or simply inflated with uncontainable joy?

About the Artist

Angel Ricardo Ricardo Rios was born in Cuba in 1965 where he graduated from the Higher Institute of Art in Havana. Ricardo’s work has an eagerness to it, a blur of boundaries within the space that it occupies. The mixing and intertwining of subjects gives way to explosions of color, texture, and shape, some of which is painted directly with his hands. To understand Ricardo’s work one must acknowledge two essential elements. The first is a playful, joyful and intimate expression that has an intense, frenzied, sexual nature, and the second is a refusal to be confined by the edges of the canvas. Often it appears as if his compositions want to break-free.

Ricardo has exhibited individually since 1981 in multiple institutions including Chapo University Museum, Popular Art Museum in Mexico City, Galeria Luis Sandoval Contemporary Art in Mexico City and Fernando Pradilla Gallery in Madrid. He has exhibited collectively in Zona Maco in Mexico City, Art Miami and the Biennial of Havana in Cuba. Ricardo has received a number of awards and mentions including Honorable Mention in the fourth Biennial of Visual Arts Yucatan Mexico as well as multiple publications including Art Magazine Spain and Art Nexus.