Peruvian-born yet Mexico-based, Kenneth Rios weaves ancestral cosmology into vibrant oil-and-acrylic canvases that drift between abstraction, realism, and dreamlike reverie.

Preferred Mediums

• Oil
  
  
• Acrylic
  
  

Biography

Raised in Lima, Kenneth Rios (b. January 20, 1982) inherited a reverence for art from Andean ancestors whose myths still echo through his practice. He formalized those roots at Peru’s storied Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, earning a degree in Art History, then deepened his studio skills at the Central University of Ecuador. Early immersion in both scholarship and technique equipped him to treat painting as research—each piece a field study in culture, color, and memory.

Frequent moves across Latin America expanded his visual vocabulary. After settling in Mexico, Rios traveled widely, showing work in Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Chile, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, and the United States. Those journeys fed an ever-growing fascination with pre-Columbian cosmologies and indigenous symbolism, sparking canvases where condor wings dissolve into auroras or ceremonial vessels float across star-dusted skies. He calls himself an esthete, humanist, and freethinker; that philosophical stance encourages a layered pictorial language that resists single-reading.

Rios’s technique fuses gestural abstraction with passages of perceptible form. Oil under-layers provide luminous depth, while translucent acrylic glazes invite spontaneous mark-making. Subtle Impressionist touches—broken color, atmospheric light—soften edges so that figures and landscapes feel half-remembered, half-dreamed. Viewers become collaborators, completing narratives within shifting silhouettes. “My compositions,” he notes, “suggest a world of interpretative possibilities where dialogue with the observer is constant and alive.”

This open-ended approach aligns seamlessly with Art Box Gallery & Studios’ curatorial emphasis on cross-cultural storytelling. Rios’s work embodies the bridge between traditional iconography and contemporary expression, offering collectors a portal into Andean-Mesoamerican mysticism updated for a global audience. Since 2015 he has maintained a permanent presence at Ríos Art Gallery in Jalisco, grounding his itinerant career in Mexico’s vibrant artistic community.

Exhibitions & Achievements

• Collective exhibition, Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Peru (2000)
  
  
• International Peruvian Art Expo, Hilton Hotel, Atlanta, USA (2009)
  
  
• “ARTMUNDI” World Arts and Crafts Fair, São Paulo & Brasília, Brazil (2011)
  
  
• Solo exhibition, Marcorama Gallery, Panama City, Panama (2014)
  
  
• Solo exhibition, López Mesta Art Gallery, Guadalajara, Mexico (2019)
  
  
• Tricontinental Arts Fair, Tenerife, Spain (2024)
  
  
• Permanent exhibitor, Ríos Art Gallery, Jalisco, Mexico (2015–present)