Escaping the aviary
You have to hand it to yourself—
the exit from the throat-cage,
the opening of this heart
the navigator of this fine harbor,
was never anyone but you
you’ve lit up every facet of
your Tiffany lamp, Sofia
and checked off every songbird on your list
Inside the aviary,
an Inca jay watches the shadow
of its own wing
among the parlor palms
and fiddle leaf figs,
murmurings of upheavals
stir, and a broad billed cuckoo
sings
there are no heroes in the halls of power
there are no saints in the high command
When did you finally see yourself?
was it in the eye of grackle, glossy
and gold—he always came and went
completely at his leisure
or was it the small Magdalene,
dancing among the heliconias,
her nimble feet moved
through a geometry no longer needed,
revealing the polygon
of your self imposed tenure
only habit was
keeping the latch closed…
— Christian Ruiz Berman
—
Harper’s is pleased to announce Escaping the aviary, Christian Ruiz Berman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features new paintings and works on paper and opens Thursday, April 9, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Christian Ruiz Berman builds paintings from compositional systems rather than holistic scenes. Plants, animals, figures, and decorative objects weave through geometrically structured environments that suggest order without resolving into fixed hierarchies. His figures inhabit fragmented, multidimensional spaces, where vignetted landscapes and patterned fields oscillate between foreground and background in an Escher-like architectural labyrinth. Drawing on motifs rooted in histories of migration and cultural exchange, as well as traditions of Mexican visual culture and magical realism, Ruiz Berman mobilizes these elements as formal agents that disrupt spatial and symbolic coherence, producing unstable, shifting arrangements.
The exhibition and its accompanying poem reference the figure of Sophia, the Gnostic embodiment of wisdom and return, as a subtle framework. Portrayed as both the source of rupture and guide toward restoration, Sophia reflects a central tension in which conceptual and aesthetic systems of order give way to moments of awareness, and where transformation emerges from within rather than being imposed from outside. Ruiz Berman’s segmented pictorial spaces and recurring forms suggest structures that are at once enclosed and generative, acting as portals into new supernatural worlds governed by their own internal logic. Escaping the aviary proposes a sensibility in which boundaries remain provisional and meaning is continually remolded, where liberation emerges not through rupture alone, but through a reordering of the systems that once contained it.
Christian Ruiz Berman (b. 1982, Mexico City, Mexico) received an MFA and MLA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and 2010, respectively, and a BA from Duke University in 2004. He has participated in artist residencies at numerous institutions, including Chautauqua School of Art, Chautauqua, NY; Fountainhead Residency, Miami; Macedonia Institute, Chatham, NY; and PLOP, London. Most recently, Ruiz Berman’s work has been the subject of solo and two-person presentations at Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City (2025); Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami (2024 and 2022); Nicodim, Los Angeles (2024); Calderón Ruiz Gallery, New York (2023); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2022); and Martha’s Contemporary, Austin (2021). Reviews of his work have appeared in publications, including Colossal, LA Weekly, and New American Paintings. Ruiz Berman lives and works in upstate New York.