Second Nature
Cristina Lei Rodriguez
14 March, 2025 – 30 April, 2025
In her solo exhibition Second Nature, Rodriguez proposes renewed ways to view our natural world. Inspired by Miami’s oceans and tropical flora, the artist brings seemingly opposite forces together, merging human intervention with nature; reality with the imagined; and micro detail with macro landscapes. An expert of surfaces, expressed through assemblage paintings as well as scanning and print technology, Rodriguez invites closer study of nature through suspended moments—activating second nature intuitive responses. An immersion into the timeless present where real flora is assembled into an artist’s fiction, Rodriguez transports everyday understanding of our environment into the surreal imagined.
Paintings
Surfaces sparkle with encrusted crystals and pearls. Paint undulates with leaves and paraphernalia embed into the covered canvases. Seductive yet chaotic, contained yet expansive in their dynamism, Rodriguez’s paintings are gems to be discovered from afar and connected with from close.
Window Artworks
Rodriguez’s awe-inspiring window coverings are abstract and immersive compositions of leaf and flower compositions translated through a flatbed scanner and expanded to human-size dimension. Both flat and interrupted yet colorfully deep in unconventional perspectives, Rodriguez pushes and pulls the viewer through a fantastical “Alice in Wonderland” trompe-l'œi. Familiar yet purposefully disorientating, the images are windows into a scanned ecology—a processed nature of titillating possibility and ominous warning.
About
Cristina Lei Rodriguez is a Miami-born artist whose parents are from Cuba and Hawaii. Working across disciplines, including painting, photography, sculpture, installation, and technology, Rodriguez is celebrated for mastering of materiality and conceptual juxtaposition to raise questions of human’s relationship to nature, pressing to our time. She has exhibited internationally at institutions and galleries including Serpentine Gallery (London), Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris, Miami), Team Gallery and Deitch Projects (both New York) and Blum and Poe (Los Angeles). Her work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), Pérez Art Museum Miami and The Bass Museum of Art (Miami), among others. She last showed work in Prague at Galerie Rudolfinum as part of the exhibition Uncertain States of America in 2004.
