Ricardo Galán (b. 1993) is a Puerto Rican painter currently based in New York City. He is a self-trained artist, with a doctorate in economics (Harvard, ‘22) and a day job in data science at a large technology firm.

Like his father — a landscape painter who worked in healthcare by day — Ricardo grew up understanding art as something you return to out of curiosity and joy. What began as a hobby has evolved into a more consistent art practice centered on themes of perception, identity, and the underlying, often hidden, mechanisms that shape our emotional and psychologically-complex worlds.

Working primarily in oils, his figurative and semi-abstract pieces blend realism with moments of surreal or symbolic disruption. His work reflects an ongoing curiosity about the forces behind what we think we see, a sensibility shaped by both his doctoral training in behavioral, experimental, and identity economics and his Puerto Rican heritage.

He is currently developing a growing body of work that includes portraiture, narrative compositions, and small experiments in abstraction.