About
Panamanian painter, born 1953. Lives and works in Panama.
Biography
Rodney Zelenka was born in Panama in 1953, the son of Jewish parents from Vienna and Hamburg who had fled Nazi-era Europe. He began painting as a child and, from 1962 to 1969, took courses at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Panama with the Panamanian masters Alfredo Sinclair and Guillermo Trujillo. He studied economics and Latin American politics at Cornell University, where he also took studio courses in the Department of Fine Arts, and graduated in 1977. Between 1979 and 1989 he spent long periods working in the studios of Julio Zachrisson in Madrid and Rodolfo Abularach in New York.
Zelenka has painted full time since 1980, the year of his first solo exhibition, at Galería Arte 80 in Panama. Over the next two decades he exhibited in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, and in museums across Latin America, among them the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá, the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana in Quito, the Museo de la Nación in Lima and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo. He took part in the centennial of the Venice Biennale (1995), the Bienal de São Paulo (1996) and the biennials of Cuenca, the Caribbean and Buenos Aires, and received an honorable mention at the 2nd Egyptian International Print Triennale in Giza (1997).
Since 2022 his work has travelled through museums and cultural centers in Mexico, from the Centros Estatales de las Artes of Tecate, Ensenada and Tijuana to the museums of contemporary art of Ciudad Juárez and Querétaro, the Museo Metropolitano de Monterrey and the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América in Mexico City, largely under the curatorship of Francisco (Pancho) López. In New York he presented Dominion and Frailty at the Tenri Cultural Institute (2022) and three solo exhibitions at Lichtundfire: Rivers of Babylon (2023), Semiotics of a Spider (2024) and Night Travelers (2026).
His subjects are power, migration and human dignity. He works in acrylic, ink, gold leaf and metal pins on canvas and handmade paper, and in carved cocobolo wood, installation and video. Critics have described his approach as a merging of realism with abstract pictorial space. He lives and works in Panama.
Statement
Transcendence and infinity are ideas I have been drawn to for as long as I can remember, and I have been making art for just as long. The work became a playground for the child in me, a laboratory for the alchemist in me, a stage for the magician in me and a case full of mirrors for the mortal in me.
I try to imagine how other beings perceive reality: how a fish sees air, a bird sees water, an ant sees the sky. Once a reality is invented, it becomes real. My paintings have no center and no fixed horizon. The eye travels to every corner, through molecular structures, crystal formations, skin, scales and feathers, and meets my cast of creatures as they try to speak to the viewer.
As the son of Holocaust survivors, I became interested in economics and politics in art. Over the last three decades this has led me to what I call the art of denouncing and the weird: abuse of power, fake news, war, and the migrations that uproot millions of people. I am not trying to change anybody's mind. I just feel very uncomfortable with abusive power. Objects became a sign of ownership, and then I noticed that all the migrants were carrying suitcases.
I work in painting, drawing on handmade paper, sculpture, installation and video, adding gold leaf, metal pins, nails and found materials. I want to provoke a reaction: to fracture the viewer's perception and let them rebuild it, hopefully in search of beauty.
— Rodney Zelenka. Condensed from the artist's own writings and from interviews given in 2022.