Rita Ponce de León

Rita Ponce de Leon (Lima, 1982) lives and works in Mexico City. Current exhibitions include El gesto y lo invisible at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (February 6, 2026 – July 26, 2026), and recent exhibitions include Histories of Ecology at Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), São Paulo (September 2025 – February 2026). She graduated from a study program on psycho-corporal techniques proposed by the Argentinean organization Río Abierto. Rita understands her work as a way to get involved in situations that, through a focus on learning and participation, lead her to the recognition of a substantially “bond-centering” world, where even ephemeral encounters are potentially meaningful. For this, the intuitive approach that the body provides clears her path. She keeps close to practices such as butoh dance and Aikido, and she often participates in workshops that promote bodily movement as a means to generate a certain type of wisdom and collective knowledge. She pours this diversity of experiences into drawings, which she shares in the form of visual essays. Rita’s work has been exhibited at the Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan (2022); the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2016); in the village of San Simón Ticumac, Mexico (2021); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2014); proyectoamil, Lima, Peru (2017); 80M2 Livia Benavides Gallery, Lima, Peru; and Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2013), among others. Her images have been published in Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing (2013). She collaborates recurrently with Joelle Gruenberg, Yaxkin Melchy, Tania Solomonoff, and Esthel Vogrig. In 2013, she won the Jóvenes Creadores fellowship (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes). In 2014, she received support from Fundación Japón to develop a series of workshops, concerts, and an exhibition with Tokyo- based artist Chikara Matsumoto. In 2016, she was awarded a Fundación Jumex fellowship for a research trip on butoh dance and drawing at the Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio in Yokohama, Japan. Her works are included in public collections such as the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection and Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI). Also her work was recently published in Phaidon’s Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now (2023).