Rafael Pérez Evans (b. 1983) is a Spanish-Welsh artist based in Oxford. He holds an MFA and BFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently an AHRC Doctoral Scholar at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, where he is pursuing a PhD in Fine Art. His current research Beyond Extraction: The Surplus Commons, focuses on surplus as a condition and site of possibility exploring agricultural, queer, and disabled devaluation.

Pérez Evans’s installations and sculptures are defined by a biting, playful sensitivity and a deliberate mishandling of materials, scales, and gestures, often grafting together tactics of queer, rural & agricultural dissent. His work reignites tired readymades from agricultural and industrial origins, alongside foodstuffs and untamed gestures drawn from protests, uniting these material and political histories. Live objects become uncontained, pouring out and away, tipped, poured, suspended, dumped and spilled into sites and institutions.
By drawing attention to the relationship between queer and agricultural surplus, Pérez Evans creates works that are simultaneously vengeful and fragile, complicating our understanding of a collapsing material and social world. The materials he works with are often unstable, mirroring the degraded lands, voices and bodies that have been rendered surplus.

His work has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions, including Perivoli, Equivocation at Cynefin, Athens (2024), Dust Bathers at Queer Circle, UK (2023); Insulin at No Show Space, UK (2022); Handful at The Henry Moore Institute, UK (2021); Pavo Realengo at Nogueras Blanchard Gallery, Barcelona (2017).  Group exhibitions include Upgrade: Orchids for Potatoes at CAAC Museum, ES (2024), Lull at Workplace, London (2024); Unpacking, Wheels at The Royal Academy, South London Gallery, and Leeds Art Gallery, UK (2019-2022); Pica at TEA Museum, Spain (2022); Thief, Invigilate at C3A Museum, Spain (2020); Salvation at Saatchi Gallery (2020); The Devil’s Bird – Ornithomancy at Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2019); L’Dounne – Divination at Matadero, Madrid (2018).

Pérez Evans received was awarded a Sculpture Fellowship at The Henry Moore Institute, in collaboration with Leeds Beckett University. Recent artist talks include Goldsmiths MFA, London; the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London; The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds and the University of Virginia, USA. He has also held recent visiting lecturer appointments at Goldsmiths MFA; the Royal Academy Schools; Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University; the Royal College of Art, Sculpture MA; and Central Saint Martins.

 

 

 

Download portfolio here

© Rafael Pérez Evans