* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Patrick McGrath Muñiz was born in New York in 1975 but grew up in Puerto Rico. He obtains his Bachelor’s Degree Magna Cum Laude in Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts of San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2003 and a Masters Degree Suma Cum Laude from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2006.
Patrick explains his work by saying, “My work responds to our consumerist society and it’s indifference to global ecological and social injustice. As a painter now living in Texas, coming from a Roman Catholic background and growing up during the 1980’s and 90’s in the island of Puerto Rico, the oldest colony in the Western hemisphere, I’m inspired by pop culture icons, Christian Iconography and mythological imagery present in Art History. These provide a set of universal archetypes that allow me to re-interpret our current socio-economic cultural and environmental conditions holistically, viewing world history as cyclical and interconnected. In my work I adopt painting techniques on canvas and “retablos” reminiscent of Spanish colonial art. This enables me to emulate earlier indoctrination strategies and devices from the time of the conquest of the Americas in order to provide historical continuity and a link between the Colonial and the Neo-colonial narratives present in our globalized society. Living in an information age, I appropriate, re-contextualize and orchestrate figures from history, religion, mythology and pop culture into satirical narratives that mirror my experience of the world in an epoch we can now call the Anthropocene.”
