Miguel Ángel Ríos, the return of the famous artist who went misunderstood

He is located in Catamarca and dialogued with the skiu Play the famous Catamarque artist Miguel Ángel Ríos, who transcended internationally with his plastic, video and conceptual work, which currently resides between New York and Mexico City.
Ríos began working here as a teacher, but it was not his way, and it cost him to understand his vocation, until he took the decisive step and began a new life.

This creator, one of the many compatriots who was arrested and had to exile in the last dictatorship, left the country in the 1970s in search of a better future.

Ríos graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and shortly after he moved to New York and later to Mexico City. Throughout his career, Ríos has developed an interdisciplinary production that addresses ideas of place, politics and power structures from a Latin American perspective. He has worked with a wide variety of languages, such as painting, drawing, engraving and objects. However, its extensive production of video art, which has been developed since the early 2000s, has received great attention.

In 2005, their video on the edge (2005), a projection of two channels that represents a series of black and white trumpes, or the trumpes as they are called in Spanish, dyeing until the fall of the last trumpe, was presented and subsequently acquired by the Houston Fine Arts Museum. In 2013, he was part of the presentation of two new exhibitions: Miguel Ángel Ríos and Carlos Motta in the Public Art Room Siqueiros – La Talable, in Mexico.

In 2015, he presented the individual exhibition Landlocked, a retrospective based on his video art; The exhibition took place at the Arizona State University Museum. The video installation of three channels to die (to The Death), of 2003, is a continuation of the visual research of the artist on trompos, establishing a parallelism with the vital cycles and the power structures. The video was exhibited at the Ackland Museum of Art of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

In 2024, Miguel Ángel Ríos was part of the video art exhibition Ríos presented with the artists Tania Candiani and Rivane Neuenschwander, among others.

Ríos’s work has been shown in individual exhibitions at the Miami Museum of Art, now known as the Pérez de Miami Museum of Art, Florida; the Dallas Art Museum; the Blaffer Art Museum of the University of Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego, California; the Hirshhorn sculpture museum, Washington DC; the Museum of Modern Art of (Saint-Etienne), France; the Carrillo Gil Museum, Mexico City; and the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires, among others.

Its media production based on time is part of museum collections in the United States and abroad, and it is an honor to have it back, so that it can convey some of its knowledge, experience and talent, which surprised the world from its origin in the Calchaquí Valley.