Bio

OTHIANA ROFFIEL

Mexico City, 1990
Lives and works in Mexico City

Othiana Roffiel's work is characterized by a relentless zeal for exploration, as well as the evolutionary quality that this entails; thus her painting mutates alongside her pictorial inquiries and her reflections on the universes that surround and contain her, stimulating unique ways of approaching her creative processes, which generally appeal to imagination and memory. The artist transforms the elements that shape her inner and outer worlds through her own aesthetic vocabulary, opening the door to new visual possibilities. Her paintings evoke enigmatic landscapes that hover between the ethereal and the earthly, the anthropomorphic and the vegetal, in suggestive configurations that are open to narrative interpretation, privileging sensation over rational thought. This has led to the consolidation of a visual language composed of forms in which abstract and figurative dissolve into one another.

Roffiel has received numerous awards and distinctions over the years. Her piece Mirage was recently recognized as one of the winning works of the 20th Rufino Tamayo Biennial, in which she had also been selected in the previous 2020 edition, presented at various venues across the country, including the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca and the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City. In 2024, she completed an artist residency at Fundación Casa Wabi (Puerto Escondido). She was also granted, in 2023 and 2019, a SACPC Jóvenes Creadores scholarship, a production fellowship awarded by the Mexican government. In 2012, she graduated summa cum laude from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, where she was recognized with the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award in Painting.

Throughout her career, her work has been featured in various exhibitions and art fairs, including El cuarto de los ojos sucios at Museo Raúl Anguiano (Guadalajara, 2025), Arte en Movimiento Jóvenes Creadores at Complejo Cultural Los Pinos (Mexico City, 2024), Under Forty at Casa Siza (Mexico City, 2024), Dreams Matter at Galería Karen Huber (Mexico City, 2024), ARCOmadrid (2024), and Zona Maco (Mexico City, 2025, 2024, 2023). In 2023, she presented her solo exhibition Rehearsal of Becoming at Galería Karen Huber and participated in group shows at Maat Gallery (Paris) and Expo Chicago. In 2021, she had a solo show, It Takes a Lot of Stuff for a Flower to Grow, at Karen Huber, curated by Laura Orozco, and exhibited collectively at Centro Cultural Plaza Fátima (San Pedro Garza). In 2020, her work was shown at Museo de la Ciudad de México, and in 2019, she presented her solo exhibition La persistente insistencia del juego at Casa Equis (Mexico City), curated by Leslie Moody Castro.

Although Roffiel's current focus is on painting, there was a period in her career, at its peak in 2016, when she ventured into art writing, contributing art criticism in specialized contemporary art magazines such as ARTPULSE (USA) and Artishock (Chile), where she has commented on the the work of numerous artists including Alfredo Jaar, Jill Magid, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Allora & Calzadilla, and Mario García Torres, among others. She has also reviewed programs and exhibitions such as Art Basel 2016, Proyecto Changarrito and Under the Same Sun: Art From Latin America Today at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 2021, one of her essays was published in the book ABCDESPAC, a project by Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo (ESPAC), a Mexico City based non-profit.