About

Omar Rodriguez-Graham in his studio in Malinalco (2025)
Omar Rodriguez-Graham in his studio in Malinalco (2025)

Statement

I am a painter working within abstraction.

I treat the surface as a register of actions. Colored pencil, ink and acrylic are incised and layered into linen until the accumulated marks hover at the threshold of legibility — never resolving into an image, never dissolving into nothing. What remains is evidence: a record of decisions made, revised, and left visible.

Painting is a frame of reference that modulates experience. Its history — gesture, color, figure, form, space, composition — is not exhausted but available: an index of visual phonemes from which the work is assembled. I am interested in what those elements can still be made to do.

Abstraction matters because it refuses translation. In a culture that expects every act to be interpretable, a painting that cannot be paraphrased returns something to the person standing in front of it — the right to a reading that is theirs. The work is not an image, which stays still, but a duration, which changes.

I think of each painting as a Trojan Horse. An offering that unfolds, and keeps unfolding, in the mind.

10, August, 2026

Bio

Omar Rodríguez-Graham (b. 1978, Mexico City) is an abstract painter. He lives and works between Malinalco and Mexico City.

His paintings are built from networks of incised marks in colored pencil, ink, acrylic and oil on linen — dense chromatic fields that hover at the threshold of legibility, resisting resolution into image and resisting paraphrase.

Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Vocabulario Contra la Interpretación, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2025); Variación No.1, Museo de Arte e Historia de Guanajuato (2024); La Interrogación de la Duda, Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguérez, Zacatecas (2023); and La Struttura della Certezza, Fondazione MACC, Sardinia (2023). He has held solo exhibitions with Galería Arróniz, Mexico City; Marc Straus, New York; and Galería Max Estrella, Madrid.

His work is held in the collections of Colección Jumex and the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Phoenix Art Museum; the Thoma Foundation; the Progressive Art Collection; and the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami. He has completed a commission for the U.S. Department of State's Art in Embassies program.

He has received four grants from Mexico's FONCA, including Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Monographs on his work have been published by Galería Arróniz (2012), Sicomoro Ediciones (2017) and Fondazione MACC (2025), with texts by Tobias Ostrander, Willy Kautz, Víctor Palacios and Daniel Montero. His work has been written about in Artforum, El País and Reforma.

In 2026 he co-founded Solar Tacubaya, a project space in Mexico City.