Rafael Pérez Evans (b. 1983) is a Spanish-Welsh artist and educator 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 examines devaluation as both a condition and a transformative site of possibility within systems of care rooted in queer, rural, and disabled communities.

Recent exhibitions include: Upgrade: Orchids for Potatoes at CAAC Museum, Spain (2024); Lull at Workplace, London (2024); Dust Bathers at Queer Circle, UK (2023), Pica at TEA Museum, Spain (2022); Unpacking, Wheels at The Royal Academy, South London Gallery, and Leeds Art Gallery, UK (2019–2022); Handful at The Henry Moore Institute, UK (2021); Thief, Invigilate at C3A Museum, Spain (2020); The Devil’s Bird – Ornithomancy at MOCA Taipei (2019); L’Dounne – Divination at Matadero, Madrid (2018) and Pavo Realengo at Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona (2017).

Pérez Evans was awarded the AHRC Humanities Scholarship (Oxford University, 2022-2026) and a Sculpture Fellowship from The Henry Moore Institute in collaboration with Leeds Beckett University (Leeds, 2021). 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.

Pérez Evans’s work is marked by a playful, biting sensitivity and a deliberate mishandling of materials, scales, and gestures, often grafting together tactics of queer, rural and agricultural dissent. His sculptures reignite tired readymades from agricultural and industrial origins, alongside foodstuffs and untamed gestures drawn from protests, uniting and activating these material and political histories. Live objects get – poured, suspended, dumped, and spilled into sites and institutions. By drawing attention to the relationship between disability, queer and agricultural surplus, Pérez Evans produces 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. 

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© Rafael Pérez Evans

Photograph by Ricky Adams.