Escaping the aviary

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.