Serie de llamas núm. 2, díptico [Llama Series No. 2, Diptych]

Miguel Angel Ríos’s works reference landscapes and cultural traditions of his homeland in rural Catamarca via formal motifs of late Modernism. While living in New York City, Ríos created a monochromatic grid from highly abstracted images of the llama, an animal essential to the Andean way of life. Catamarca once formed the southernmost reach of the Inca empire, and Ríos’s llamas may evoke ancient pictograms or the patterning of local textiles made from the animal’s wool. Within the Post-Minimalist grid, the llamas also suggest a negotiation of Ríos’s identity between cultures and an implicit critique of the Eurocentric biases underlying artistic Modernism.