Biography from Hackett-Freedman Gallery:
| Gustavo Ramos Rivera (b. 1940–) is an abstract painter. Through his use of color and a personal symbology, Ramos Rivera has created a language that is written throughout his paintings, monotypes, and collages. This singular expression functions on both an intellectual and emotional level and its deployment is reminiscent of the work of Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Cy Twombly.(1) It also harkens back to the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art and architecture of Ramos Rivera’s native Mexico.
Like his signage, the colors floating on Ramos Rivera's canvases reference his cultural past while remaining grounded in his present day environment. His work follows the thread of 20th-century Mexican painting from Rufino Tamayo to Francisco Toledo, melding this tradition with that represented by San Francisco Bay Area abstract painters Frank Lobdell, Manuel Neri, and Richard Diebenkorn.
Ramos Rivera’s work has evolved over the past three decades; the dark, tar-laden canvases of the 1980s represent internal states of mind more so than his later works. In the 1990s, Ramos Rivera began working with color fields punctuated by simple hieroglyphics. Over time, he has broken down these fields and is now juxtaposing large areas of laid color to create images that radiate sensation.
Gustavo Ramos Rivera was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States in 1969. He has lived in San Francisco for over 30 years. In 1992 he received a Fleishacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship. A retrospective exhibition of Ramos Rivera's paintings and works on paper was held at the Ex-Convento del Carmen in Guadalajara, Mexico in 2005, and traveled to other venues in Mexico. In January 2006, the San Jose Museum of Art held a retrospective exhibition of paintings, with companion exhibitions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and other venues, which will tour to the Fresno Art Museum in the summer of 2006. A comprehensive monograph on the artist was published by the San Jose Museum of Art in 2005.
1)Bruce Nixon, "Everything Is Possible: Paintings by Gustavo Ramos Rivera," in Gustavo Ramos Rivera (San Francisco: San Jose Museum of Art, 2005).
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