CONRAD RUIZ (US)
The Los Angeles-born and based artist has spent nearly two decades honing a painting practice that is both omnivorous and multidimensional, feeding on the chaos of modern image consumption, then reverse engineering its harshness via delicate watercolor applications. In many ways, Ruiz’s process reflects a lifetime of layering, which began as a teenager in the Inland Empire, where he was raised by an elementary teacher mother who was born in Mexico City and a Cherokee-descended father who worked as a sheriff in Los Angeles County during the tumultuous 1980’s and 90’s. While navigating a childhood that bounced between running with a crowd of bullies at school and embracing the mosh pits of punk clubs, Ruiz’s first artistic pursuits began with clipping images of issues from Time, National Geographic, and Newsweek as a teenager. “I had more access to printed matter, but after moving a few times, I started collecting images online and putting them into folders. My work in grad school was a combination of the two,” says Ruiz. “The printed matter usually condenses information into what is deemed worthy of printing, and the edits are less nuanced: a corgi, Barack Obama, the Challenger explosion.”
When he began working as a painter, his early subject matter vacillated between the poles of machismo and what he terms “the boy zone.” “The boy zone conversation is a tough one for me,” says Ruiz. “I was chasing the memory of close friendships with my guy friends in middle school, where we were aware of sex and violence in the world but not yet participants. The unbridled energy of that time period was mixed with video games and action movies as a setting.” Those settings would later manifest in ecstatic renderings of sports gods and their attendant crowds in moments of peak agony or frenzy.
Conrad Ruiz (*1983, US) lives and works in Los Angeles, US. H has had solo exhibitions at Ochi Projects, Los Angeles (2019); the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara (2015); Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (2009, 2012); and Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City (2011). He has participated in group exhibitions at The Pit, Los Angeles (2021); No Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles (2018); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2018); and the Consulate General of Mexico, Los Angeles (2018). Ruíz received his MFA from the California College of the Arts, and lives and works in LA.