Rigo 23
Lives and works in San Francisco, USA
As we walk around a city we are visually bombarded by advertising: billboards, posters and hoardings selling us products and lifestyles, promising us everything from faster broadband to younger-looking skin. Portuguese artist and activist Rigo 23 uses public space in a different way: to prompt us to reflect on our society, to ask questions, to look more carefully at what’s under our noses. In Liverpool, he turns his attention to some of the city’s most familiar figures: the stone lions in front of St George’s Hall, one of Liverpool’s grandest neoclassical buildings. His intervention is witty and playful, but the underlying question is an important one: how do we relate the difficult legacy of Liverpool’s colonial past to the very different world of today?
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2006 Jam Sessions : Rigo 84-23, Centro Das Artes- Casa Das Mudas, Madeira Island, Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal
Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, USA
2002 Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, USA
2001 Artists Space, New York, USA
Making Made in Taiwan 3, IT Park Gallery, Taipei
2000 Tate Wikikuwa (The Wind Follows the Sun), Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago
1999 Rigo 99-MATRIX/Berkeley 179, Berleley Art Museum and Paicific Film Archive, California, Berkeley, USA
SECA Art Award Exhibition, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA
Making Made in Taiwan 2, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, USA
Selected Group Exhibitions
2006 Monuments for the USA, White Columns, New York, USA
2005 Touch of Evil, Tijuana Station, Tijuana, Mexico
Found: Everyday Objects in Bay Area Art, di Rosa Preserve, Napa, California
2004 Topographies, San Francisco Art Institute and Pasadena Museum of California Art
California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, USA
Global Priority, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco, USA
2003 Revealing Influences: Conversations with Bay Area Artists, Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco, USA
2002 No War, The Luggage Store, San Francisco, USA
Fast Forward, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, USA
2001 Widely Unknown: Margaret Kilgallen and Her Circle, Deitch Projects, New York, USA
Marked: Bay Area Drawings, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Sonoma and Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, USA
2000 democracy! Royal College of Art, London, UK
Juvenilia, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, USA
Goddamn the Pusherman, The Showroom Gallery, London, UK
Further Reading
Mark Beasley, Rigo 23 Vol. 1, Centro das Artes Casas das Mundas, Calheta, Madeira, 2006
M.T. Karthik, ‘Rigo 23’, [W] ART, no.008, 2006, pp. 24-29
Thomas Bonk, ‘San Jose Statement’ Los Angeles Times, June 26 2006
Topographies, San Francisco Art Institute, 2004
David Bonetti, ‘A Constructivist Comeback’, San Francisco Chronicle, March 16, 2002
public realm
