Installation view of Raul De Lara and Madeline Peckenpaugh at The Armory Show (September 25-27, 2026 / VIP Preview — September 24, 2026), New York, NY, Booth P5. Photo: Daniel Greer
Raul De Lara (b. 1991, Culiacán, Sinaloa, México) handcrafts wooden sculptures that depict household objects and the natural world. Poetic symbolism emerges, inspired by his experience as an immigrant from Mexico and a DACA recipient. His work balances political messages with exploring the beauty and mystery of the natural world and the mundane.
De Lara received an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin. He has held museum solo exhibition at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA and The Contemporary Austin, TX. De Lara’s work has been exhibited at Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Museum, CA; Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Wharton Esherick Museum, Paoli, PA; MINT Gallery, Munich, DE; The Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York, NY; and Institute of Contemporary Art | Maine College of Art & Design, Portland, ME. The artist has been featured in Art in America, The New York Times T Magazine, American Craft, and Interior Design, among many others. Accolades the artist has been awarded include the Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Craft, The Hopper Prize Shortlist, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Craft/Sculpture, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Fellowship, and Luminarts Fellowship Finalist. He lives and works in New York City.
Raul De Lara in the studio, New York City, 2026. Photo: Hannah Edelman.
RAUL DE LARA, SHANIQUE EMELIFE, SIHAN GUO, TAHNEE LONSDALE
December 11, 2024–January 15, 2025
HOST: Raul De Lara
September 12, 2025-January 11, 2026
The Contemporary Austin, Austin, TX
Raul De Lara: Raíces/Roots
January 15-July 6, 2025
SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA
THE ARMORY SHOW 2026
Raul De Lara and Madeline Peckenpaugh | Booth P5
September 25-27, 2026 (VIP Preview — September 24, 2026)
The sculptor Raul De Lara is known for making handcrafted pieces in wood depicting flora and household objects. He recently made work for Hermès.
For his latest collaboration with Hermès, the Mexican artist Raul De Lara brings his whimsical wood sculptures into the world of luxury craftsmanship, exploring the relationship between nature, production and the objects that accompany our lives. A key factor in De Lara’s approach to art-making is the imaginative exercise of anthropomorphizing ordinary objects to reveal their inner lives. Guiding his practice is a fundamental question: when does a piece of wood stop being merely a material and become an object with a personality, a history or even a spirit?
“A lot of the motifs I’ve been doing in the past few years are what I call our silent roommates, which include your houseplants, furniture, objects that accompany our daily life,” he explained. “A lot of my work reflects my interest in bringing personalities to these seemingly inanimate objects. When do they come to life? What does that spark of life look like?”
When we spoke, De Lara was preparing to present at The Armory Show with Alexander Berggruen in a duo booth where his new sculptures would be paired with paintings by Madeline Peckenpaugh.
Alexander Berggruen is showing the whimsical wooden sculptures of Mexican-born, Queens-based artist (and Silver Arts Project alum) Raul De Lara, just weeks after the artist unveiled his window installation at Hermès Madison Maison and opened a solo exhibition at The Contemporary Austin. His anthropomorphic plants and botanical forms that become furniture hint at a reenchantment of the mundane, while serving as metaphors for his own experience of in-betweenness as someone who immigrated to the U.S. and lived without documentation for approximately eight years before entering the DACA program. One highlight is Mis Flores / My Flowers, in which five potted flowers, each rendered in a different-colored wood, suggest the possibility of adapting and flourishing in new environments, even after being transplanted. Presented alongside the raw intuition of Madeline Peckenpaugh’s fluidly organic abstract stratifications, the gallery placed most available sculptures early in the fair. The Hermès window apparently generated multiple requests for commissions and works ahead of the fair.
Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Sihan Guo, and Tahnee Lonsdale challenge conservatism through explorations of migration, spirituality, and interconnectedness.
The works in this exhibition collectively dismantle the boundaries imposed by the narrow designation of “immigrant” in the United States, embracing instead a globalized, interconnected ethos. De Lara’s wooden monstera sculptures signify both personal and ecological migration, while Emelife, Lonsdale, and Guo explore the interplay between human and transcendental forms, challenging Western spiritual and cultural binaries. Together, these artists offer a dynamic rebuke to the conservative ideologies of their surroundings, asserting the enduring strength, complexity, and beauty inherent in their lived experiences and work.
At the Artists Talk for the end-of-year show at Alexander Berggruen, exhibitors Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Tahnee Lonsdale, and the gallery’s director in the place of Sihan Guo (currently in Shanghai) gathered to reflect on their work. Highlights of the show include the “female tribes” of Lonsdale’s practice, as she termed the figures at the talk. Working in the realm of feminine lifeforms that veer into the angelic or ethereal (with the smallest of eyes), her ghostly representations are the result of layers of thin paint, washed onto canvases in progressive strokes to broker the creation of vibrant, veiled apparitions. Additional notice is warranted for De Lara. His unmistakable walnut sculptures are rendered in deep, earthy curves against the flashes of vibrant color on the wall’s paintings. De Lara, a DACA recipient from Mexico, explores how plants “bear witness to the ups and downs of life,” as show notes read, using this exploration into potted plants as kindred symbolism for his personal journey with mobility.
A deep breath taking in scenery. A slow exhale, finally at ease. A held breath in anticipation. The paintings of Madeline Peckenpaugh and sculptures of Raul De Lara, presented together, forge a scene eliciting the same visceral responses the body finds when it stands within the familiar, the unknown, or a place of longing. For their debut feature at The Armory Show 2026, the two New York-based artists turn to expressive abstraction and figurative realism respectively to capture the ways natural surroundings hold and surface deep sentiments, from personal memory to shared experiences.
On December 14, 2024 on the occasion of the group exhibition Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Sihan Guo, Tahnee Lonsdale (December 11, 2024–January 15, 2025), Alexander Berggruen hosted an exhibition walk-through with the artists. This video features the entire talk in which Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, and Tahnee Lonsdale spoke about their work. The gallery’s associate director Kirsten Cave spoke about Sihan Guo’s work on her behalf.
