Born in 1943 in Catamarca, Argentina, Ríos fled the military dictatorship of the 1970s and built a practice across New York City and Mexico City that has been exhibited at MoMA, MoMA PS1, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, MUCEM Marseilles, and institutions across Europe and the Americas. His work is a fifty-year reckoning with what it means to be Latin American. Ríos is widely recognized as one of the most significant conceptual artists to emerge from Latin America over the past half century.

Currently on view at MAINTENANT (until July 26) Watch Your Step! is Ríos's most recent body of work may be his most visceral statement yet: a series of paintings that double as storyboards for a hand-made frame-by-frame animation. The cowboy boot — loaded symbol of territory, masculinity, and the border — is dismantled to expose what happens inside: the battered, swollen, morphologically grotesque foot. Nothing heroic remains. What Ríos gives us instead is an X-ray of endurance. The animation moves too fast for the eye to take it all in — the overload is intentional. In an era of AI-generated imagery, every frame was made by hand, and that choice is both personal and political.