Marco Rios is an artist and curator working mainly in sculpture, performance, photography and video. Rios’ work often references existing narratives and typical genres spanning across mid-century cinema, Giallo, Film Noir and literature, which he uses to address themes and motifs that comprise those of flesh, death, paranoia, gore and delirium. With a certain sense of kitsch and mordant humour, Rios’ practice constantly revolves around his fascination for mortality, touched upon as both a casually mundane and deeply existential concept. The representation and presence of death in popular culture are explored through his work in projects as diverse as Despair Beyond Despair (2011), a performance in which he restages the murder scene of a notorious Dario Argento film, or Death’s Boutique (2010), which documents through sculptures, photographs and video a series of research trips on contemporary, ecological burial techniques in Sweden. Rios work is generally infused with a sense of melancholia, absurdism and radicalness through which are reflected common human conditions.