Christian Ruiz Berman

Lives and works in NYC, NY, USA

Artist statement

I was born in Mexico City and grew up in Mexico and in New England. I studied international relations at Duke University, and landscape architecture and painting at RISD. I’ve worked in environmental conservation, forestry, public art, and education. If life is a vast broth of tangled relationships and reactions, making art is how I chart my way through the soup. My work draws from histories of adaptation and migration, and as the son of a musician and a scientist, I find myself interested in the con- fluences of experimentation and improvisation. My painting practice is meditative in that it strives to dissect and understand the components of my experience and of my cultural and aesthetic legacy in a way that might give a greater understanding of the whole. Even as the symbols, architectures, and snippets of stories that I employ are deeply personal and autobiographical, I want my paintings to embody a shared experience. The ability for the viewer to live their own life inside my work is extremely important to me, as is the work’s potential to inspire new narratives. I am influenced by contemporary philosophy, including the recent writings of intersectional philosophers like Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. These writers strive to build a worldview that privileges intra-actions and entanglements between things and systems rather than a reality built upon discrete objects and hierarchies. Barad writes about describing reality as an apparatus, in which each person, animal,...

Artwork