Bony Ramirez

Bony Ramirez’s rural upbringing in the Dominican Republic, his first encounters with Catholic imagery, and his deep interest in sources as varied as Italian mannerism, Renaissance portraiture, and children’s illustrations reverberate within and around the fictional characters he creates. If each figure appears to be transposed into a changing theatre of symbolic surroundings and backdrops, it is the artist’s technique that renders this possible. Ramirez creates his heavily stylized, proportionally distorted figures on paper, and adheres them onto wood panels featuring idyllic, colourful backdrops of Caribbean imagery. As Ramirez’s characters, developed separately and simultaneously in oil stick, paint, and coloured pencil, make their way onto his works, so too do various other symbolic appendages. Ramirez uses a variety of objects which either complement the playfulness and idyllicism of his work, such as colourful beads, or contrast it by penetrating it with violence, such as real knives stabbed into the canvas.

Bony Ramirez has exhibited at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas), the Newark Museum of Art (New Jersey), François Ghebaly (Los Angeles), Bank/MabSociety (Shanghai), Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal), Jeffrey Deitch (New York), among others. Ramirez was recognized in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Arts & Style category in 2023, and The Artsy Vanguard 2021. His work is housed in the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Newark Museum of Art, the Frye Art Museum (Seattle), the Perez Art Museum (Miami), and the X Museum in Beijing.

Born in Tenares, Dominican Republic, 1996

Works in Jersey City, USA