Estefania Velez Rodriguez

Visual Description: An abstract painting featuring a mix of warm red, pink, and purple tones, with an arched structure resembling a doorway leading to patterns that suggest a blend of natural and ornate motifs.

Descripción Visual: Una pintura abstracta que presenta una mezcla de tonos cálidos rojos, rosas y morados, con una estructura arqueada que se asemeja a una puerta que conduce a patrones que sugieren una mezcla de motivos naturales y ornamentales.

Visual Description: An earth-toned painting depicting an open stone archway leading to a landscape with a road and a sunburst partially obscured by dark clouds. Scattered blue objects, resembling pills or cobblestones, are in the foreground inside the archway.

Descripción Visual:  Una pintura en tonos terrosos que representa un arco de piedra abierta que conduce a un paisaje con una carretera y un sol parcialmente oculto por nubes oscuras. Objetos azules dispersos, que se asemejan a píldoras o adoquines, están en primer plano dentro del arco.

Visual Description: Two abstract paintings placed side by side, resembling textile art with heavy textured patterns in earthy tones on the left, and on the right, featuring a blend of pastel pink tone colors creating a complex and intricate visual language. The patterns suggest a blend of natural and ornate motifs.

Descripción Visual: Dos pinturas abstractas colocadas una al lado de la otra, que se asemejan a arte de textil por los patrones de textura pesada en tonos terrosos a la izquierda, y a la derecha, presentando una mezcla de tonos de rosa pastel creando un lenguaje visual complejo e intrincado. Los patrones sugieren una mezcla de motivos naturales y ornamentales.

About

Estefania Velez Rodriguez (b. 1985, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico) is an American artist born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. As a dual-tongued individual, she utilizes the symbolic language of painting as a bridge between many cultures and spaces. Her work often uses abstracted landscapes as well as non-objective visual spaces that are somewhat open field and bright. Her landscapes meander and distort physical spaces like mazes which are meant to be misleading. Utilizing chemical reactions within painting, Velez Rodriguez experiments with raw pigments, spray materials, oil mediums, and acrylic polymers. Her painting language ruptures visual spaces to open the viewers' receptivity to fleeting spaces, times, and emotional presence.

Velez Rodriguez lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a MFA in painting from Brooklyn College in 2017. Velez Rodriguez is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute (NY), Rutgers Newark (NJ), Montclair State (NJ), and Brooklyn College (NY). She is represented by Praxis Gallery in New York City. Selected recent solo exhibitions include: Small Rocks Tagged, Lipany Gallery, Fordham University New York, NY (2023); Time is probably an illusion, Praxis Gallery, New York, NY (2021); False Catalog, Auxiliary Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2019). Selected group exhibitions include: Unstructured Play, Below Grand, New York, NY (2023); Pratt Faculty Show, Schafler Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2022); Diasporic State of Mind, Praxis Gallery (2022); Like Apples and Knives, Soil Gallery, Seattle, WA (2021); Seeing Through The Spectrum, University Of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AK (2019); Now or Never Series, Edda Jakab Studio Gallery VSC, Johnson, VT (2019); and more. Her work has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, and Revista Marvin. She has a public mural project with the Arts and Cultural Grant of New York and Norte Maar, and was a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Artist Grant (2020).