Rubén Esparza collages male bodies and bourgeois interiors in new art

Rubén Esparza: Fantasies & Fails: Collage Artworks 2015-2021 will be on view at the Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival

Yooth n Deth, 2017, in situ ©Rubén Esparza

Rubén Esparza is an artist, activist, and independent curator exploring queer and Latinx histories, existential trauma, and the reconciliation of his heritage that of the colonizer and the colonized. Using analog materiality alongside complex experimental digital-driven artworks, Esparza creates sociopolitical commentary or homage to brownness and/or queerness.

ICU B_062520, 2020 ©Rubén Esparza

Most of his material these days is sourced from the slowly disappearing smut and glossy lifestyle magazines, picked up where he left off some 30 years later. His research into Queer Abstraction and Latin American architecture inform his latest works on paper. The bulk of the collages were created during the COVID-19 lockdown, serving as a meditative reprieve and a mandatory break from his other artmaking and curatorial practices. The artist digitally placed his artworks onto moneyed or bourgeois interiors sourced from the internet, continuing his edict of queering and brown-ing physical or virtual spaces, lending visual imaginings to potential collectors.

His most recent solo exhibition at Tom of Finland Foundation featured artworks spanning over twenty-five years. Receptions hosted included performances by Sheree Rose, Ridge Gallagher, Oscar David Alvarez, Marval A Rex, Jamison Karon, and others, with exhibitions in Berlin, Chile, Mexico City, and New York.

Rubén Esparza: Fantasies & Fails: Collage Artworks 2015-2021
will be on view at the
Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival

COMPLETE ARTICLE AND GALLERY

Published: 1st December 2021

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