Rosario Rivera-Bond is a Dominican-American artist based in Miami, Florida. Her work has been the result of an intuitive approach to the unconscious sources of creation expressed through the cultivation of a very personal and courageous language nourished by the tenets of abstract expressionism, lyrical abstraction, action painting and trans-avantgarde. She studied Interior Architectural Design in Santo Domingo and Visual Arts at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris, and the Camden Art Centre, London.
In 2011, Rivera-Bond held her first solo museum exhibition, “Simply an Illusion,” at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo. There she exhibited both paintings and three-dimensional works, as well as an installation made by hanging from the ceiling elements belonging to her “Fragments” series, which were reflected in a circular mirror base. During the run of this exhibition, Rivera-Bond also experimented with participatory art: She invited the public to donate a trivial object they had in their wallets. She then arranged and glued the collected elements, displaying them on a white circular surface. The resulting work was titled I Got It Out of My Purse.
I Got It Out of My Purse, 2011
In the second decade of the millennium, Rivera-Bond returned to using bright, cheerful colors, applying them to a surface in brief strokes. Using white as a veil, colors appeared as surface or as imprimatura, as a dripping or a touch, either alluding to a form or not. Various works of the series “Too Good to Fail” and “Panoramic” show this chromatic enjoyment.
During this period and subsequently, Rivera-Bond’s painting became more lyrical. In the series “Gestures”, “White Mischief”, “Happy Ashes” and “Unbounded”, stains became independent of the background—which tended to be a monochromatic white, cream, or gray or, as in “Happy Ashes”, were applied directly onto a raw canvas. The impasto was modulated and the color, still vibrant, integrated softer tones. In “Happy Ashes”, the artist incorporated the use of Flashe-Paint, a pigment that allowed her to access matte blacks that were diluted in soft and blurred tones and textures.
In 2017, Rivera-Bond exhibited a solo show titled “Splash” at the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo. On this occasion, Rivera-Bond constructed two installations, Out of the Box—incorporating abstract-geometric modules into the space—and Sequía (Drought), in which the artist expressed her ecological concerns. In addition, Rivera-Bond screened a video installation titled Journey.
In 2018, the artist moved from Coconut Grove to Coral Gables, and established her studio in what had been her family home of many years, and where her children had grown up. From the now new studio, she looks out over the tropical garden of the house, with lush South Florida vegetation. This reunion will be key to the creation of the “Back to my Garden” series.
In 2024, she presents the exhibition “Rosario Rivera-Bond. Emotionally Charged. 2013-2023” at the Miami International Fine Arts (MIFA), offering a retrospective view of the last ten years of her work.
Rosario Rivera-Bond has participated in more than 60 group exhibitions in USA, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. In 2017 and 2018 she was awarded the Juror’s Choice Award at the ArtBrazil Contemporary Art Fair in Fort Lauderdale.
Katherine Chacón