Bony Ramirez República Dominicana, b. 1996
Overview
‘The way to express everyday life and also surreal, to be able to reinterpret many things I grew up with in different ways that go beyond the real world.’
Bony Ramirez
Through a combination of painting and drawing, Ramirez adheres life-size paper figures onto painted wood panels. His subjects are bold yet strange, often appearing mysteriously oversized or contorted. Bony Ramirez adheres black and brown drawn figures onto painted wood panels, creating mixed medium portraits that portray contemporary Caribbean life and the underlying European colonialist history that remains in the psyche of individuals.
Biography
Bony Ramirez was born in 1996 in Tenares, Salcedo, Dominican Republic. He currently works in Jersey City, New Jersey. His 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.
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), BradleyErtaskiran (Montreal), the Newark Museum of Art (New Jersey), Franç ois Ghebaly (LosAngeles), Bank/MabSociety (Shanghai), Jeffrey Deitch (New York), among others, andwas recognized in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Arts & Style category in 2023, and The ArtsyVanguard 2021. His work has recently been acquired by the permanent collection of theInstitute of Contemporary Art Miami, as well as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, theNewark Museum of Art, the Frye Art Museum, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and the XMuseum in Beijing.