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 painted wood panels, creating mixed media portraits that portray contemporary Caribbean life and its underlying colonial history. 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 symbolic appendages. Ramirez integrates a variety of objects which either complement the playfulness and idyllicism of his work, such as rhinestones and wallpaper, or contrast it by penetrating it with violence, such as real knives stabbed into the canvas.

Bony Ramirez lives and works in Jersey City, United States. Notable exhibitions include the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas), the Newark Museum of Art (New Jersey), Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Frye Art Museum (Seattle), François Ghebaly (Los Angeles), Bank/MabSociety (Shanghai), Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal), and Jeffrey Deitch (New York), among others. Ramirez’s work is collected by 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, DO, 1996

Works in Jersey City, US