Rodrigo Valenzuela

Rodrigo Valenzuela's work addresses Latin American Sociopolitical history, labor unions, and undocumented workers. It is shaped by blue-collar aesthetics. Autobiographical elements inform a postcapitalist critique of social and civic institutions. His work blurs documentary and fiction to address the tension between individuals and the way their own communities are often represented. Valenzuela works across photography, video, and installation, merging his interest in art history, architecture, the concept of work, and the realities of laborers. He builds scenes in his studio, often working with simple building materials such as cinder blocks, pipes, wooden palettes, corrugated metal, and two-by-fours. The resulting monochrome photographs constantly shift between flatness and architectural space, and between documentary photography and fiction, encouraging an incessant yet pleasurable tension. His compositions resemble miniature ruins built from studio detritus, and are documentative of the artist's performance in the studio. Simultaneously, they clearly reference certain Modernist masters - be it Abstract-Expressionist painters or Minimalist sculptors - as well as Latin-American Brutalist architecture.

Rodrigo Valenzuela (b. Santiago, Chile, 1982) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, where he is an Associate Professor and Head of the Photography Department at UCLA. Valenzuela is the recipient of the 2025 Foundation of Contemporary Art/Richard Pousette-Dart award, the 2024 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award, the 2023 Harpo Foundation Grant, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Award, the Art Matters Foundation Grant, and the Artist Trust Innovators Award. Recent solo exhibitions include The Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; BRIC Arts Media, NY; Screen Series at the New Museum, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Orange County Museum, Santa Ana, CA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. Recent residencies include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, Dora Maar Fellowship, Ménerbes, France; Fountainhead Residency, Miami FL; Core Fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; Lightwork, Syracuse, NY, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY.