In his M.F.A. thesis exhibition ADAPTIVE BODIES, Alejandro Giraldo presents paintings, prints, sculpture, and a new multimedia installation featuring imagined male-presenting characters whose emotions and contradictions recall the artist’s own experiences with professional life and acts of productivity. Performing familiar actions related to work, the figures become caricatured, contorted, and deformed by physical, psychological, and symbolic pressures, revealing the ways professional structures and expectations shape identity and physical posture. Here, the body functions simultaneously as a pictorial vehicle and an expressive mechanism, acting as a site where tensions, frustrations, and ironies accumulate and find resolution through the gesture of painting.

Across Giraldo’s oeuvre are references to himself, including his own hand, codifying each work as indirect self-portraits and exposing a dichotomy between his two identities — the corporate figure and the painter. By representing both, Giraldo creates a critical distance from which to observe and interrogate these roles, confronting his own contradictions while questioning the structures of success and productivity that shape his personal biography and artistic practice. Revealing the absurdity inherent in contemporary expectations of capacity, ADAPTIVE BODIES asks how we function as sites of constant negotiation — and at what cost.

Opening reception: Friday, March 27, 5–7 p.m.