Rodrigo Red Sandoval primarily works through sculpture and installation. His practice explores the grey areas that shape our relationship to urban environments, bodies, and contemporary networks, focusing on the multiple environments in which we are entangled. Taking infrastructures as a point of departure, he assembles discarded industrial materials (cables, pipes, architectural frameworks) with handcrafted elements and digital techniques. Through gestures of reconfiguration, insertion, and carving, he places functional systems under tension in order to reveal their underlying, often invisible logics. This process of de-standardization consists in altering established uses to generate new formal and symbolic possibilities. He pays particular attention to the environments of our contemporary everyday life, as well as to neglected zones: the gritty underbellies of the urban landscape, the hidden infrastructures that sustain our lives on the surface, and already degraded natural surroundings. Positioned between observation of the real and fictional construction, his work engages with the margins. His sculptures bring together heterogeneous registers—anatomical, organic, and fictional—where vertebrae, nests, clocks, and other elements coexist alongside fragments of urban infrastructures. His works take the form of hybrid assemblages, like snapshots in which systems, narratives, and temporalities overlap. This fragmentary quality extends to the materials he mobilizes—industrial materials, found elements, raw matter, and objects he fabricates—stemming from varied processes, as if tracing the different strata through which the world comes into being and transforms. Through these assemblages, Rodrigo Red Sandoval approaches sculpture as a critical tool to rethink—and tend to—the material and narrative grammars that underpin contemporary life.
Trained in philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2012), he later received his MFA from The Glasgow School of Art (2016) and was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie (2018). His work has been presented internationally, notably as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries (ICA London and Liverpool Biennial, 2016), as well as at W139 (Amsterdam, 2019), Arti et Amicitiae (Amsterdam, 2021), the Center for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow, 2021), Deli Gallery (Mexico City, 2023), Jack Barrett Gallery (New York, 2023), and guadalajara90210 and JO-HS (Mexico City / New York, 2023–2025). His work has received several awards and forms of support, including the Material Art Fair Acquisition Prize (2022), the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award (2017), and grants from the Mondriaan Fonds (2019, 2020, 2021) and the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst (2021). More recently, he has been supported by the Amarte Fonds (2024) and Het Cultuurfonds (2025).