The Galería Elba Benítez is pleased to announce Carlos Garaicoa’s coming exhibition at the gallery, opening on Saturday, February 24th.
Titled π=3.1416, the show will consist of a series of new works stemming from the artist’s desire to delve into the pictorial tradition of Latin American geometric abstraction, on this occasion on wood. The series, which will be shown for the first time at the Galería Elba Benitez, blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, architecture and design, geometric and figurative art.
The work of Carlos Garaicoa (Havana, 1967) is characterized by an informed engagement with the genius loci of contemporary cities (and in particular of his native Havana) as manifested in their architecture and infrastructure, to which Garaicoa brings a sharply critical yet restlessly inventive artistic vision. Garaicoa works in and across various mediums and disciplines —sculpture, photography, drawing, installation, architecture, urbanism and text-based work— yet always maintains an exquisite execution and a meticulous aesthetic in his finished works. While his Cuban heritage serves as a point of departure, the full scope of Garaicoa’s artistic practice extends to a broader range of subject matter, including 20th-century utopianism, classic modernist forms and ideals, the infrastructures of centralized state planning, the vestiges of colonial architecture and urbanism, and the current-day shifting political and economic terrain of post-colonial globalism.
Garaicoa has had solo exhibitions at the Fondation Brownstone (Paris, 2022); the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna (Bologna, 2022); the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, 2020); the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) (Santiago de Compostela, 2018); the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art (London, 2018); the Fondazione Merz (Turin, 2017); and the MAAT Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia (Lisbon, 2017) and elsewhere. He has been invited to participate in numerous international exhibitions such as the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018), documenta 14 (2017), 18th Biennial of Sydney (2012), the 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010), and the 53rd Venice Biennial (2009). He is currently featured in the XVI Cuenca Biennial, where he is presenting the work Familia (2023). In 2021 Garaicoa received the PEM 2021 Award (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, USA).
π=3.1416 is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the Galería Elba Benítez.