Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

Cuna y arrullo, 2025

Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa Cuna y arrullo, 2025 Commissioned and produced by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Installation view: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. Espectros luminosos. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2025 Photo: Román Lores / Joaquín Cortés

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

Commissions & Productions

Artworks On view

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa

Cuna y arrullo, 2026

Installation with six sculptures (metal, raison, paint)

Various dimensions

Commissioned and produced by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

In Cuna y arrullo, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa expands his practice toward subjects with a global resonance, while remaining rooted in intimate, lived experience. Conceptually and artistically, childhood—its logic, its freedom—serves as a powerful counterforce to dominant structures. It disrupts the established order and opens the door to parallel realities that are no less valid for being irrational or imagined.

This installation evokes a dreamlike stage—simultaneously playful and poignant—emerging from memories of the artist’s early life. It specifically recalls the time he spent in shelters for refugee children in Mexico, a transitional period before he was granted asylum in Vancouver. As in his previous work, Ramírez-Figueroa turns to the dream as a narrative device, one that both bridges and deepens the gaps in fragmented memory. In keeping with ancestral worldviews, particularly from the Mayan cosmovision, dreams are not secondary to waking life but essential guides—realities that inform, challenge, and coexist with the everyday.

Through this lens, the artist employs a logic that is fluid and intuitive, allowing for unexpected associations to surface. These surreal interconnections create a kind of soft instability, where meaning shifts and certainties are undone—just like in dreams.

At the center of the work is the cradle, structurally and symbolically deconstructed. It becomes a liminal space inhabited by hybrid creatures that move freely between dream, memory, and lived experience. Among them—the spider, the bee, the lizard—are beings drawn from the Ch’olti’ Dictionary, a 17th-century linguistic and ethnographic document compiled by the evangelist friar Francisco Morán. By invoking this nearly lost Mayan language, the installation conjures not just personal memory, but the spectral presence of a broader cultural lineage, speaking to survival, translation, and the afterlives of erased knowledge.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW:

Solo exhibition: Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa “Light Spectra”

Curator: Soledad Liaño

Venue: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Date: 28 May 2025 - 20 October 2025

Related works in the collection

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa Huertos de los ch’olti, 2020

Related program

Naufus Ramirez Figueroa Deus ex machina, 2021

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa Cuna y arrullo, 2025

Artists

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa