Pablo Lazala Ruiz (b. Bogotá, 1992) is a Colombian artist, architect, exhibition designer, and educator living and working in Chicago, IL. He is interested in the specificity of spaces and in creating critical materiality that openly engages in conversation with the ideologies that haunt and inhabit them. He believes in the possibility of creating new spatial support platforms that invite voices from diverse contexts to manifest.

His practice investigates the dynamics that shape public and private spaces while questioning ideals of progress and colonization processes, particularly in Colombian and Latin American diasporas. This exploration often unfolds through invoking and burying physical and ideological structures. His work both reinforces and engages in conversation with spaces' rituals. It disassembles the rhetorics of architecture through removals, dwells within the languages of construction and its scaffolding's temporalities and materialities, and gravitates through the formal and conceptual structures of installation and sculpture to create intentional (re)positionings that reveal the systems produced by the built environment.

He received his MFA (2024) from the Sculpture Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the New Artist Society scholarship. He earned a BFA (2016, Honors) and a BA in Architecture (2019) from the University of the Andes in Colombia.

He has exhibited work in solo and group shows at the National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), Museum of the Bank of the Republic (Bogotá), The Wrong Biennale (Alicante/Bogotá), Santa Fé District Gallery (Bogotá), Compound Yellow (Chicago), Espacio Odeón (Bogotá), Espacio Más Allá (Bogotá), Nueveochenta, Liberia, and SGR galleries (Bogotá), and Chapinero ArteCámara Gallery (Bogotá). Since 2019, he has also worked as the director of architecture, exhibition designer, and installation coordinator for the Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo, with projects at MoMA, Serpentine Gallery, MCA Chicago, Sydney Biennale, and more.

Image: Pablo Lazala Ruiz, Andamio y Balsa (Scaffold and Raft), 2024, Red chalk powder, chalk reel line, raw clay, plantain leaf. Image Credit: Jonas Mikosch Müller-Ahlheim