Ofelia Rodriguez is one of those figures caught up in between cultures as she grew up in the Colombian Caribbean but ended up evolving her career abroad. Her work is characterized by a firm interest in showing her latin tropical roots, being completely conscious of the clichés they involve and mixing them with gender issues in a very humorous and pop language. She did her studies in Universidad de Los Andes in the late sixties and did her masters degree at Yale University and some studies in Pratt, as well as in Paris where in 1978-1979 she showed her first assemblages, magical boxes, that use up toys, religious symbols, clocks and daily use objects. Through her work Rodriguez creates a symbiosis of the artist leaving her local background, and builds a strong characterization of the latino abroad, to confirm her existence and intentionally uses the stereotype of herself to master her creative proposal.
Her paintings and boxes involve strong symbologies of the feminine and masculine in her native country: the macho condition vs. the frivolous women that lie in the everyday culture of Colombia. The artist, who moved early on to London exacerbates this visual rhetoric through her work as a way to picture her country from abroad, from a culture where she doesn’t belong. It is as a manifesto, a stubborn and ironic way to scream: I come from the land of paradise, wildness and magical realism, but always with something more reflective lying beyond the obvious.