José Antonio Hernández-Díez VENEZUELAN , b. 1964

José Antonio Hernández-Diez is an artist whose work includes sculpture, photography, video and installation art. 

He studied at the Film Training Center in Caracas. His work has been included in the 2003 Venice Biennale. The work La hermandad was included in the exhibition Cocido y crudo (The Raw and the Cooked) at MNCARS, Spain, in 1994, curated by Dan Cameron, and is currently part of La Caixa collection. Between 2002 and 2003 his retrospective exhibition took place, which travelled to a number of museums including the New Museum in New York, SITE Santa Fe and the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art in Florida.

Hernández-Diez is part of a generation of Venezuelan artists who emerged in the late 1980s. He uses "street" materials like skateboards, washing machines, pool tables, paper bags, fake nails, blood plasma, cow heards, surgical equipment, nitrogen tanks, giant mechanical jaws or battery-operated remote controls in order to develop a personal iconography centered on familiar, often domestic, objects. The ordinary is made extraordinary through Hernández-Diez's provocative, darkly humorous use of material and scale. 
Elements from his Venezuelan childhood are combined with images that refer to a more global pop culture. In this way, the artist transforms the natural debris of our technology into shamanistic objects that disturb our aesthetic habits.