Vicente Rojo studied sculpture and ceramics in Barcelona until 1949, when he had to go into exile with his family to Mexico, where he studied painting and typography, working for more than fifty years as a graphic designer, painter and sculptor.

Belonging to the Grupo de la Ruptura Mexicana, he also collaborated with the founding of the ERA publishing house, among other editorial projects, cultural supplements and various publications.

Vicente Rojo’s work is fundamental to understanding Mexican and Latin American visual culture in the second half of the 20th century. His painting has had a great influence due to its link with informalism and the Catalan symbolic world. Some of his pictorial works include diverse and unusual materials such as rubber, pieces of wood, baskets and found objects, also presenting the broad grammar of signs of informalism.

In the middle years of his career, Vicente Rojo created the series Mexico under the rain (1981-1989), a set of iconic works that abound in exercises of chromatic saturation. In these works, the dense curtain of rain is interspersed with the staggered lines of Aztec temples and other references to Mexico City. Rojo thus proposes the elimination of the traditional focal points of visual attention in the pictorial field, so that the entire painting is the very center.

Vicente Rojo has built up close friendships and affinities with the literary universe, which led him to design various covers for Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Prize winner for Literature, including those for the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). For the catalogue of his exhibition Vicente Rojo: volcanes construidos, de pintura, escultura y grabado (2000 a 2005), renowned authors such as García Márquez himself, Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, Sergio Pitol, Enrique Vila-Matas and José-Miguel Ullán collaborated with texts.

Various awards and decorations have been bestowed upon him for his legacy, including the National Prize for Science and Arts in Mexico, the Mexico Design Prize and the Medal of Merit in Fine Arts in Spain. In 1998, UNAM awarded him an Honoris Causa doctorate and, in 2006, the Spanish government awarded him the Decoration of the Encomienda of the Order of Isabel La Católica. In 2011, the National Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico (INBA) also awarded him the Medal of Fine Arts.

Throughout his career, Vicente Rojo has held solo and group exhibitions at numerous international institutions, such as the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte (MUCA – Mexico City), Visual Arts Center at The University of Texas (Austin), Museo Amparo (Puebla), Museo Casa de la Moneda (Madrid), Museo Nacional Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City), Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico City), Klingspor Museum (Frankfurt) or Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), among many others.

His work is part of important public and private collections, among which stand out: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA – New York, United States), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC – Mexico City, Mexico), The University of Texas Museums (Austin), Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris, France), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Bogotá, Colombia), Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City, Mexico), Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (Mexico City, Mexico), Colección Banamex (Mexico City, Mexico), Museo de Arte Abstracto Manuel Felguérez (Zacatecas, Mexico), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Ateneo de Yucatán (Mérida, Mexico), Museo Rufino Tamayo (Mexico City, Mexico), Colección Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango (Bogota, Colombia), Colección Resistol (Mexico City, Mexico), Colección Alfa (Monterrey, Mexico), Museo Pape (Coahuila, Mexico).