September 14 – October 14, 2025

Public Opening: Sunday, September 14, 2025 5-8 PM

Preview: September 12, 2025 11 AM-5 PM

CENTRAL FINE; 36 NE 54th St, Miami, FL 33137

Inaugurating our new space in Little Haiti, CENTRAL FINE presents Zelmira Rizo’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The following text shares the artist’s introductory remarks:

I approach drawing (v.) as a practice that moves, sweats, and performs on the platformor stage that is a wood panel, canvas, a wall, the floor, a page. It is like automatic writing and somatic movement. A phrase, feeling, or question opens and guides the unfolding of a piece. It usually becomes its title.

 On this platform, figuration and abstraction are records of movement, modes of mark-making that embody my conceptual and material explorations: to collapse and build figure and space, image and material, into entities that “touch,” that exist in greater awareness of their connection and similarity, than of their ‘boundaries’ and difference.

Ladders, a foot, a kitchen window; living rooms and smoky skies; a bed, a half-bitten pear, a figure perched on a door frame; a coffee cup spilling into a mug of tea; a perky breast and its fallen bra strap… dissolve and come back into form within and across these works, sometimes reappearing for a second act. The intention: to expand the notion and language of body, environment, experience, interior and exterior space, highlighting an inherent permeabilitythat suggests our nature is connection.

“Cable a tierra” reflects an urgency to ground, to come down. Drawing and painting grew to embrace moments that hold this gravity. The exhibition becomes a space where recorded and reimagined daily accounts call to the celebratory nature of experiencing moments in their full form—eyes open, in resonance and coherence, like touching the Earth with bare feet.

Zelmira Rizo (b. 1995, Miami, FL; Peruvian descent) has a BA from Cornell University with studies in biology, comparative literature, and architecture (2018), and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2025). Rizo has exhibited at the Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Columbia University; Fridman Gallery, New York; CENTRAL FINE, Miami; Lenfest Center for the Arts, NY; Wallach Art Gallery, NY; Olive Tjaden Gallery, Ithaca, among other venues.

She is the recipient of the Betty Lee Stern Prize for Artists at Columbia University School of the Arts and the Morty Frank Travel Fellowship (both 2025). Rizo was a fellow at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies (2023–2025); resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami (2022, 2023); and was Curatorial Fellow and Research Assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019, 2020).