Originally from the Catholic capital of Guadalajara, Mexico, he currently resides in Narrm Melbourne, Australia. Ramírez completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT University and an Honours Degree of Fine Arts at Monash University. He is represented by MARS Gallery.
He is currently undertaking a PhD at Monash University, using auto-theory set in the time period 2018-2023, to explore arts practice through the administrative language of bureaucratised artist led contexts, from a Cultural and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) perspective.
Short Bio
Diego Ramírez is an artist with dreams, a writer with hopes and a facilitator with beliefs. He has shown locally at ACMI in partnership with ACCA, NGV, Gertrude Glasshouse, Westspace, Sydney Contemporary, Blakdot and internationally at Deslave (Mexico), Human Resources (US), Torrance Art Museum (US), Art Central (HK), and Careof (IT). Ramírez has written locally for Art Gallery of Western Australia, Art and Australia, Disclaimer, MEMO, un Projects and internationally with NECSUS (NL) and BLUE journal (US x FR). As a facilitator, he is the former Director of Seventh Gallery, delivers workshops and mentorships. Ramírez sits in panels regularly, such as Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne, and Creative Australia. He is represented by MARS Gallery.
The Artist
Diego Ramírez works across a range of mediums. In 2024, he began a series called Performance Appraisal to revisit past work through administrative frameworks generated by conscientious management. For Performance Appraisal 2 at This Hideous Replica curated by Joel Stern and Sean Dockray, he sub-commissioned a Cultural and Environmental Safety Audit by Eliki Reade to re-frame his videos on show.
His solo exhibition Vampires of the Earth (2023) gained significant attention by consolidating his work with text, images, and materials such as resin, pespex and neon. He went on to show some of these works at Sydney Contemporary with MARS Gallery later the same year.
In 2018, he screened a collection of his moving image works at ACMI in partnership with ACCA in Diego Ramirez: Towards the Umbral, curated by Annabelle Lacroix. He was part of the survey show Melbourne Now at the NGV with his video The Perfect Ever co-curated by recess in 2023. His films are shown internationally, participating in Terror En Lo Profundo curated by Deslave at Human Resources LA in 2018 and Unco curated by Ian Haig at Torrance Art Museum in 2013. Various international festivals have shown them also, such as EXiS, FILE Sao Pualo, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Kuala Lumpur EFVF, and Channels Video Art Festival.
He is also known for performance, like the black piñata filled with institutional confetti he broke in Contact High curated by Anador Walsh at Gertrude Glasshouse 2023, and the comical audition for Buffy The Vampire Slayer in Lifenessless at West Space x Gertrude Contemporary in 2019, as part of Ventriloquy curated by Joel Stern.
He also makes objects and pictures, including the life size vampire coffin for the group show Those Monuments Don’t Know Us in 2019. His pictorial work often takes over murals and facades, such as the large scale banner exhibited at Aeon Resurrection curated by Jake Treacy in 2022, which tackles Columbus’ manipulation of a solar eclipse. In 2024, he reframed this banner as Performance Appraisal 1, where he asked Westspace to labour on top of the banner, destroying its surface with office movements.
The Writer
He incidentally became a writer by doing catalogues for friends, early in his career. Today he regularly contributes essays, profiles, reviews and prose to a range of publications. In 2023, he wrote a polemic for Parallel Structures x Runway Journal called Tylenol killed your empathy to soothe a headache, and now you are progressive in the arts, which integrated his interests in auto-satire.
In 2022, he wrote a catalogue essay for Jon Campbell in Speech Patterns, at AGWA. His arts criticism features in Art and Australia, NECSUS, un Projects, Runway Journal, Art Collector, Running Dog, MEMO, Art Collector, Art Guide, Blue Journal, Meanjin, Performance Review and Australian Book Review.
In 2019, he presented The Horrible Affair between a Sadistic Image and a Masochistic Text at West Space as part of WRITING&CONCEPTS, a lecture on the relationship between his art and writing. Ther next year, he participated in Writing In The Expanded Field with ACCA x non/fictionLab. In 2022, he delivered a masterclass for the Digital Young Writers Program at the National Gallery of Australia.
He has spoken about his ideas on art and writing, on high profile media channels such as ABC and SBS. As well as conference presentations such as Dark Eden at Artspace, and Experimenta Social at ACMI X. In 2021, he participated on a panel for Print Screen at the National Gallery of Victoria, speaking about digital publishing.