From the series the Old and the New (XI)

2010 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

10H x 17.5W inches

Carlos Garaicoa

From the series the Old and the New (XI) by Carlos Garaicoa belongs to the series Lo viejo y lo nuevo / Das Alte und das Neue (The Old and the New) which was first exhibited in 2010 at Barbara Gross Gallery in Germany. Here, Garaicoa’s interest in vernacular Cuban architecture shifts towards the European context: a series of twelve nineteenth-century French engravings have been reworked into delicate paper models. Here, the two-dimensional old-school architectural renderings have become the foundation for new hollow three-dimensional structures. Reminiscent of pop-up storybooks, the small-scale paper forms have also been augmented with black paper shapes, which both resemble the images in a shadow theater and recall abstract modernist forms.

Like many other Latin American artists in the Kadist Collection, Cuban-born Carlos Garaicoa’s conceptual works look at architecture as a palpable indicator of the region’s socio-political and cultural histories. Working since the early 1990s in a wide range of media that includes sculpture, drawing, video, and photography, Garaicoa explores architectural forms and urban landscape aiming to reveal the multiple facets of the modern project’s failure in the Latin American context. His work is influenced in particular from growing up in Havana, a socialist city where unfulfilled utopias meet the traces of an oligarchic past in every building’s facade.

Colors:

• architecture.n.01
• re-formation.n.01
• replace.v.01
• three-dimensional.s.01
• delicate.s.03
• architecture in art
• city scenes
• cityscapes
• color photography
• contemporary conceptualism
• cuban
• cuban contemporary artists