Gustavo Ramos Rivera
Stewart Gallery is pleased to collaborate with the artist residency program at Monte Azul to present work by artist Gustavo Ramos Rivera.
Gustavo Ramos Rivera worked with the support of Master Printmaker Rudy Espinoz (Costa Rican, 1953-2018) to produce these as a Resident Artist at Monte Azul in 2013. The works are inspired by Gustavo's daily hikes through the rainforest, which he took every morning before going to the studio. He was particularly struck by the exuberance of plant and animal life, and the massive boulders throughout the grounds, especially along the Río Chirripó which borders the entire length of the property. At the studio he would meet daily to discuss his plan with Rudy Espinoz, a highly regarded printmaker among artists on a regional level with the National Workshop of Engraving at the School Casa del Artista, an alternative and experimental space for printmaking. These works from Monte Azul are multiple drop prints done on our 1977 Griffin Press, using Gamblin Color inks primarily, with most of them worked on by hand and/or with chine colle and other media by the artist. The works produced at Monte Azul are identified by a small image of a bird next to the artist's signature.
Born in 1940 in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, Gustavo Ramos Rivera moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969 and gradually established himself as a highly respected abstract painter and print maker. He belongs to a generation of Mexican artists who emerged between two distinctive eras: one, a society still clearly marked by Mesoamerican traditions, the mestizo land whose heritage had been both simplified and compellingly codified by the Mexican muralists; and the second, a postwar culture in the process of becoming truly international, which was moving inexorably beyond the grasp of those traditions as well as their representations, and which came of age during the early 1960s. As an artist of this subsequent generation, Ramos Rivera has demonstrated an ever-greater willingness to look outside Mexico for ideas, and particularly to the contemporary art of Europe and the United States."
Ramos Rivera’s work is in the permanent collections of prominent institutions including the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, The Mexican Museum in San Francisco, and The Nevada Museum of Art. In 2006, the San Jose Museum of Art presented a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work, which then traveled to additional institutions in California and Mexico.
Over the past four decades, Gustavo Ramos Rivera has developed a unique visual language that manifests throughout his paintings, monotypes, and collages. His playful and powerful abstract compositions can be read like a visual diary, the expression of which works on both intellectual and emotional levels. Ramos Rivera’s fields of rich color and glyph-like mark making recall both the work of Joan Miro, Paul Klee and Cy Twombly and the iconography of the indigenous cultural heritage of his native Mexico. The marriage of spontaneous linework with technicolor fields create a highly personal symbology that speaks to memory, experience, and shared history. Ramos Rivera says of his practice, “Painting is a delightful devotion, a mirror of truth; it’s an invention of anything you want.”