Rafael Perez Evans

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 DPhil in Fine Art.

Pérez Evans traces how pressure accumulates within communities at breaking point and how that pressure erupts into physical form. Working across sculpture, installation and sound, he thinks from fractured forms of life, holding breakdown as both a lived condition and a site of liberation.

His practice is marked by a playful, biting sensitivity and a deliberate mishandling of materials, scales and gestures. Working with tired readymades of agricultural and industrial origin, alongside organic matter and untamed gestures drawn from protest, Pérez Evans grafts together tactics of dissent and makes them sculpture: objects are poured, dumped, suspended and spilled, returning to sites and institutions as charged, restless things that carry their material and political histories. At other times, the work turns towards quieter gestures: a handful of grain to keep a body going, a fallen tree on which to rest, a familiar song to sing together.

Tracing how worn bodies, lives and lands are pushed beyond value, Pérez Evans produces works that are at once tender, vengeful and fragile. His unstable materials give form to a world in collapse, mirroring degraded lands, voices and bodies that have been rendered surplus.

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Recent exhibitions include Brown Notes at Mostyn, Wales (2026); Upgrade: Orchids for Potatoes at CAAC Museum, Spain (2024); Lull at Workplace, London (2024); Dust Bathers at Queer Circle, UK (2023); Pica at T.E.A, 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).

Commissions for public sculptures include Horizontals for Wakehurst, Kew Gardens, UK (2026) and Mountain for the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK (2021).

Pérez Evans was awarded a Sculpture Fellowship from the Henry Moore Institute with Leeds Beckett University (Leeds, 2021). Alongside his practice, he lectures across UK art schools. Recent artist talks include the University of Oxford; Goldsmiths MFA, London; the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London; the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds and the University of Virginia, USA.

Photograph by Ricky Adams.