Diego Rodriguez-Warner

Diego Rodriguez Warner (b. 1986, Managua, Nicaragua) lives and works in Denver, CO. He received an MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 and a BA from Hampshire College in 2009, and studied in Havana under Cuban Minister of Fine Arts Lesbia Vent Dumois. Rodriguez Warner has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Washington Pavilion, South Dakota; and RULE Gallery (Denver and Marfa), among others. His work was included in State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary, Bentonville, AR, where it was also acquired for the museum’s permanent collection. Additional exhibitions include Museo de las Americas, Denver; the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Colorado Springs; and presentations in Berlin, New York, Miami, and Havana. He is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2020) and the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship (2013).

Rodriguez Warner’s paintings explore how images carry meaning across time, particularly those shaped by systems of cultural dominance and exchange. By fragmenting and reconfiguring familiar visual forms, he unsettles their authority, allowing them to shift between familiarity and dislocation. His painterly motifs draw from art-historical and visual traditions shaped by histories of power and circulation, which he reworks to disrupt their inherited frameworks and reassert agency over how they are seen. His compositions resist a fixed point of view, as figures overlap, dissolve, and re-emerge within unstable pictorial spaces where clarity is continually interrupted, and beauty and tension coexist—moments of refinement offset by disruption and collapse. Working on plywood, Rodriguez Warner builds images through layers of paint and carved marks, creating sharply defined lines that are both constructed and disrupted, producing compositions that oscillate between illusion and material presence. Rather than resolving into a single narrative, the work holds competing forces in view—seduction and unease, control and rupture—asking not only how images are constructed, but who they serve, who they exclude, and how they continue to shape what we see.