Working from Berlin and New York, artist Ron Rocco sculpts material assemblages and deeply referential interventions of signs and space. Tracing back to the scrap metal yards that colored the landscape of his Bronx youth, Rocco's practice reveals a clear fascination with material structures and their mutable functions. Occupying a place between sculpture, installation, painting and performance, Rocco's raw aesthetic exposes a potential within inert materials. His objects and assemblages relate nostalgic associations and critically examine signs in and out of context. His sculptures exist as symbols, with layered references to a conflicted identity, personal pathos and a sharp political consciousness.

Rocco's materials clash, separate and merge, emoting a raw picture of conflict through tangles of neon wiring and fragments of metal. Such separations and compositions create a visual tension, marring an aesthetic compatibility and forcing the viewer to refigure a number of disconnected elements and associations. His symbols become dramatic staging?s of political impressions, wires and tubing reminiscent of Bruce Nauman colliding with Jasper Johns iconography.

Bordering on the margins of disaster and conflict, Rocco's highly charged works hint at the collapse of form and function amidst a dissolving sense of social or personal order. His raw and refined aesthetic, expose a highly acute and critical interaction, with intersecting ideologies and histories.

Ron Rocco has participated in exhibitions at Amerika Haus and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, P.S.1, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in New York. He has been awarded New York. State Council on the Arts funding for Individual Artist Sponsored Projects as well as National Endowment for the Arts sponsorship, and awards in Sculpture and Printmaking from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work is a part of the permanent collections of Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; and the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany; and has had an installation commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in New York. Rocco also has public art pieces at a Bergen Light Rail Station in Jersey City, NJ, as well as in Seattle, WA through the Washington State Arts Council and Art in Public Places.