Rodrigo Hernández
El Espejo
ARCOmadrid
6 – 10 March 2024

ChertLüdde, Berlin and MADRAGOA, Lisbon are delighted to present El Espejo at ARCOmadrid, a project by Rodrigo Hernández (1983, Mexico) originally commissioned by Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín and Museo Jumex in 2022.

Taking works from his traveling exhibition El Espejo, this specially designed cabinet by Hernández speculates on a possible encounter between the Colombian artist and researcher Antonio Grass (1937, Santander) and Danish designer Verner Panton (1926, Gamtofte – 1998, Copenhagen). The presentation results in a real situation that juxtaposes different creative universes that are, in both principle and essence, incompatible. Nevertheless, through a series of paper-mâché sculptures produced in Medellín and wallpaper reproductions of Hernández’s original hand-painted murals, his presentation explores the one motif that unites them: the circle.

The result is a metaphor that proposes similarity or closeness between different objects and, as a consequence, the ability to reveal what they have in common. In doing so, the two subjects, as well as the two collaborating galleries, begin to mirror each other. This is further conceptualized in the drawings of Hernández and fictional correspondences between Grass and Panton by writer and independent curator Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio. Rich with Rodrigo Hernández’s geometric abstraction, this kabinett inspires different modes of understanding the intersections that bind people together.