Carlos Rolón/Dzine (American, b. 1970) attended Columbia College Chicago with a concentration in painting and drawing. The artist has held solo exhibitions at The Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; and Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. His work has also been exhibited in group shows at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Marta Herford Museum, Herford, Germany; Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum del Barrio, New York; and Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Canary Islands. In 2007 Rolón represented Ukraine in the 52nd Venice Biennale. He is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painting and Scultpure.
Rolón’s work is included in the following public collections: Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Brooklyn Museum, New York; City of Chicago Public Art Collection; Museo del Barrio, New York; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, and Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev among others.
The artist is represented by:
Salon 94, New York
Leeahn Gallery, South Korea
SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo
Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong; Shanghai, and Singapore
Continuing his investigation into Kustom Kulture and its relationship to art, sub cultures and the institution, Chicago-based artist Carlos Rolón/Dzine has developed a unique practice creating work that contextualizes these diverse elements to develop his own language. The work addresses these issues through a lens of spirituality, beauty, desire, faith, folklore, and identity. Incorporating the ideals of craft making, appropriation and the baroque, the end result is mixture of sculpture, paintings, and installation. The juxtaposition and combination of the studio paintings, the appropriated and original kustom kulture sculptures result in hybrid artifacts that are beautifully crafted, aggressive, thoughtful, sexual, and strangely seamless. The artist seeks to change the rules concerning the final image by illuminating how the masculine can become delicate, how baroque can be minimal, and how rational can become emotional. The work is at once melancholic, excessive and exuberant, poised somewhere between celebration and regret. The result proves to be universal and painstakingly honest.
Dzine lives and works in Chicago.
