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Kenny Rivero — Hierros
Kenny Rivero

Hierros

2022

Hierros presents a small but quietly commanding vision from Kenny Rivero, rendered in oil on wood in 2022. Working at an intimate scale of roughly 20 by 25 centimeters, Rivero brings to bear his signature layering of cultural memory, spiritual iconography, and personal mythology. The wood support itself participates actively in the work, its grain and material presence lending an earthen quality that reinforces Rivero's sustained interest in the tactile and the ancestral. The title, translating loosely from Spanish as "irons" or "metal objects," suggests both weight and utility, grounding the image in a vocabulary of tools, relics, and inherited things. Rivero, who was born in New York to Dominican parents and studied at Hunter College, has developed a practice that draws fluidly from Caribbean folk traditions, Catholic visual culture, and the textures of diasporic life in the United States. His paintings resist easy categorization, existing somewhere between the devotional and the documentary, the intimate and the mythic. Hierros exemplifies this balance, offering a concentrated dose of his sensibility at a scale suited to close, sustained looking. Represented by Charles Moffett Gallery in New York, Rivero has attracted significant critical attention for his ability to transform modest formats into sites of genuine pictorial and emotional complexity. This work is being offered through the Broadway Housing Communities Benefit Auction, making its acquisition an opportunity to support an important social mission while adding a meaningful example of one of contemporary painting's more distinctive voices to a collection.

Medium
Oil on wood
Overall

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About this work

Kenny Rivero, Hierros, 2022

Hierros presents a small but quietly commanding vision from Kenny Rivero, rendered in oil on wood in 2022. Working at an intimate scale of roughly 20 by 25 centimeters, Rivero brings to bear his signature layering of cultural memory, spiritual iconography, and personal mythology. The wood support itself participates actively in the work, its grain and material presence lending an earthen quality that reinforces Rivero's sustained interest in the tactile and the ancestral. The title, translating loosely from Spanish as "irons" or "metal objects," suggests both weight and utility, grounding the image in a vocabulary of tools, relics, and inherited things. Rivero, who was born in New York to Dominican parents and studied at Hunter College, has developed a practice that draws fluidly from Caribbean folk traditions, Catholic visual culture, and the textures of diasporic life in the United States. His paintings resist easy categorization, existing somewhere between the devotional and the documentary, the intimate and the mythic. Hierros exemplifies this balance, offering a concentrated dose of his sensibility at a scale suited to close, sustained looking. Represented by Charles Moffett Gallery in New York, Rivero has attracted significant critical attention for his ability to transform modest formats into sites of genuine pictorial and emotional complexity. This work is being offered through the Broadway Housing Communities Benefit Auction, making its acquisition an opportunity to support an important social mission while adding a meaningful example of one of contemporary painting's more distinctive voices to a collection.

Medium
Oil on wood
Dimensions
overall: 20.3 x 25.4 cm
Year
2022
Seen at
Broadway Housing Communities Benefit Auction

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Collected by

Gavin Kennedy