Alex Rodríguez

Alex Rodríguez was born in Cali, Colombia, in 1981 and lives and works in Bogotá. His practice explores reality as both a cultural condition and an individual construction, focusing on the people, places, and situations through which everyday reality is produced and experienced. Working primarily with drawing, painting, and photography, Rodríguez also incorporates materials that retain traces of their original contexts, including paper flyers, found objects, and other remnants of specific places. These materials become both the subject and the physical evidence of his investigations. A sustained interest in the house, the school, and the city runs through Rodríguez’s work. He approaches these spaces not simply as architectural structures but as social forms that organise individual and collective experience. His works often emerge from processes of research and direct engagement with particular places, combining observation with the collection and transformation of objects, images, documents, and other materials connected to their histories. Drawing occupies a particularly important position within his practice. Rodríguez describes it as a form of knowledge that allows him to understand both his surroundings and his relationship to others. His images are frequently simple in appearance but carry the traces of the investigations from which they emerge. More recently, he has also incorporated collage, using the superimposition of layers as both a formal technique and a way of thinking about reality itself. One of his significant projects, *Dibujos y modificaciones, Sor Teresa Valsé*, developed from his research into a religious school in Bogotá that had closed in 2009 and was subsequently demolished. Rodríguez worked with elements of the institution, including furniture, blackboards, religious images, didactic materials, and the original architectural plans. Through drawings, assemblages, installations, and video, the project examined the school as a social structure and considered its disappearance in relation to the transformation of the city and the crisis of the modern educational project. The exhibition was presented at Centro Don Bosco in Bogotá and later at Casas Riegner in 2015, with support from a 2014 creation grant from Colombia’s Ministry of Culture. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Colombia, including *Ciudad de las Américas* at Casas Riegner and *Objeto de estudio para una república popular demediada* at Museo La Tertulia in Cali. He has also participated in exhibitions such as *Detonantes*, *Un día después*, *TIMELINE: Entre memoria y conciencia*, and *Pensamiento escultórico* at Casas Riegner. Through the use of everyday materials, researched images, drawing, painting, photography, and collage, Rodríguez develops a practice attentive to the relationship between memory, architecture, objects, and social structures. His work examines how particular places and their material remains can reveal broader forms of cultural organisation, while maintaining a close connection to the ordinary circumstances through which individual and collective realities are constructed.