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The sculptural forms devised by Cristina Lei Rodriguez are abstract conglomerates coming from a post-atomic era, telling stories of decay and ruin. Although natural processes of growth and decline have been a source of inspiration for much of her work, the artist has recently turned her gaze away from nature and focused it instead on cultural constructions of uncertainty and instability. In her latest works, the material is shaped with a critical sensibility towards the bulimic voracity and shameless glamour that accompany contemporary capitalism, towards the accumulation of wealth that goes hand in hand with the threat of a total collapse of the system.

To create her sculptures, Cristina Lei Rodriguez adopts a sort of ready-made obtained from the use of a multiplicity of materials such as plastic, resins, wire mesh, plaster, paint and debris, modelled through a gestural aesthetic of destruction and decomposition, thanks to which they are crushed, crumpled and twisted around themselves or project heavily outwards, letting thick drips of paint run down onto the pedestals on which they stand.

Experimentation with material is a persistent feature of the artist’s work and becomes an integral part of it at the moment in which they respond to their surroundings, which characterize their mutability through chemical and physical reactions.

The sculptures are often realized in colour schemes determined by a tonal range that defines a link between them and the titles of the pieces sometimes consist of verbal predicates that underline the necessary role of the artist’s action at the moment of their creation. Cristina Lei Rodriguez seduces the viewer through the construction of a formal elegance that transmits a refined bodily experience, qualified by a fluid and polished appearance, at once organic and minimalist, in a sanitized and sterile vision of nature that reveals a strong tension between the natural and the artificial, omnipresent in the landscape of Miami, the city from where the artist comes.

Cristina Lei Rodriguez was born in 1974 in Miami, where she currently lives and works. After graduating from Middlebury College, she took a master’s degree in Fine Arts at the California College of Art and Crafts. Her work has been shown at internationally famous galleries and included in major exhibitions at museums, including the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, the Hessel Museum at Bard College in New York, the Reykjavik Art Museum and the Serpentine Gallery in London, and has been acquired by important private collections like the Rubell Family Collection and de la Cruz Collection in Miami. In 2009 she was invited to take part in the 2nd Athens Biennial.