SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Ruby City announces Open This Wall, a year-long solo exhibition of works by artist Daniel Rios Rodriguez, on view from October 25, 2025, through October 4, 2026 in Ruby City’s Studio at Chris Park. Bringing together twelve years of the artist’s paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, this exhibition marks a defining period in Rodriguez’s career: from his return to San Antonio in 2013 after years in New York City, to his 2025 appointment as Assistant Professor of Painting at Meadows School of Art, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.
The exhibition’s title, taken from one of Rodriguez’s paintings is based on a dream and speaks to the artist’s openness to both creative and personal transformation. Installed within Ruby City’s 2,200-square-foot Studio, Open This Wall features core themes of Rodriguez’s practice—portraits, dreams, and intimate reflections on everyday life—anchored by a site-specific wall drawing, the artist’s first, which wraps around the entire gallery making the exhibition an immersive experience.
Known primarily as a painter, Rodriguez blends abstraction and representation with found objects, producing symbolic, emotive images that balance specificity with openness to interpretation. His compositions capture personal experiences—a run at dusk, the intensity of a Texas summer, time with loved ones—alongside surreal dreamscapes dense with emblematic forms. Everyday encounters along the San Antonio River, its flora and fauna, and the artist’s inner life intertwine to form works that are both deeply personal and universally resonant. Grounding his unique vision are references to his Mexican-American identity through the inclusion of pre- Columbian glyphs and iconography, Mexican handicrafts, and Spanish language titles.
During this formative twelve-year span, Rodriguez refined his tightly controlled painting style, developed a distinct visual vocabulary, and experimented with drawing, printmaking, ceramics, and mixed-media. Found materials, often collected during his neighborhood walks, form the basis of the frames he crafts for his paintings and enable his images to extend beyond the picture plane, imbuing them with votive and totemic qualities. The exhibition highlights this fertile period of experimentation and growth, shaped by the artist’s time in San Antonio, where he forged a practice rooted in close observation and lived experience.
“Daniel’s work offers a poetic exploration of everyday life that is both specific and expansive,” said Elyse A. Gonzales, Director of Ruby City. “Open This Wall not only showcases the artist’s extraordinary output over more than a decade but also honors the importance of San Antonio in shaping his unique vision.”
Open This Wall reflects Rodriguez’s ongoing search for timeless, universal subjects through his singular blend of metaphor, symbolism, and material experimentation. It stands as both a celebration of his achievements and a farewell to a city that profoundly influenced his artistic journey.
Daniel Rios Rodriguez (b. 1978, Killeen, TX; lives Dallas, TX) has exhibited his work in solo and group presentations at White Columns, New York City; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York City; Artpace, San Antonio; Camden Arts Centre, London; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Seven Sisters, Houston; and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, among others. He was a 2018 Artist in Residence at the Chinati Foundation and received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2013. Following studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he earned his MFA from the Yale School of Art. His work is held in the collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, New Hampshire. Rodriguez was recently appointed Assistant Professor of Painting at Meadows School of Art, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.
