Purchase Rodrigo Valenzuela's fine print from 2019 and receive a free copy of his signed contact sheet from his 2019 exhibition at Light Work, American Type. Please note the frame is not included.
Contact Sheet
Contact Sheet 200: Rodrigo Valenzuela
Publisher: Light Work (January 2019)
The title of Valenzuela’s exhibition, American Type, refers to a 1955 essay in which art critic Clement Greenberg frames the work of abstract expressionist painters such as Pollock, Kline, Motherwell, and Rothko as distinctly American. Greenberg proposed that post-war American painting was more about the act of painting itself than about any complex idea of representation. Valenzuela finds it interesting to challenge this concept and, as he puts it, to contemplate “how much the absence of content has become the American gold.” He doesn’t argue that abstraction is necessarily without subject or emotion, but Valenzuela questions Greenberg and art world elitism more generally by making his own subversive abstractions that he imbues with social-political meaning.
Fine Print
American Type 15, 2019
Archival inkjet print, 14x11″ image on 15x12″ paper
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist
Rodrigo Valenzuela’s work in photography, video, and installation boldly addresses themes of labor, power, and representation. In American Type, he uses and critiques the language and history of abstraction in art, simultaneously imbuing his photographs with social and political meaning.
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Rodrigo Valenzuela lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He studied art history and photography at the University of Chile (2004), holds a BA in Philosophy from The Evergreen State College (2010), and an MFA from the University of Washington (2012). Recent residencies include Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), Center for Photography (Woodstock, NY), Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), Light Work (Syracuse, NY), MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, NH), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Recent solo exhibitions include Future Ruins at Frye Art Museum (Seattle, WA, 2015), Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer (Vienna, Austria, 2018), Work in Its Place at Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR, 2018), New Land at McColl Center (Charlotte, NC, 2017), American-Type at Orange County Museum (Santa Ana, CA, 2018), Labor Standards at Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR, 2018), and Prole at Ulrich Museum of Art (Wichita, KS, 2016). Valenzuela is an assistant professor in the Department of Art, University of California at Los Angeles, and recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Award for Painters and Sculptors. He participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in August 2017.