20th September 2024
Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma presents the exhibition ‘Carlos Garaicoa. All Utopias Go Through the Belly’ which, coinciding with the Nit de l’Art week organised by the ArtPalma Association of Galleries, was inaugurated to the public on Friday 20th September 2024.
‘All Utopias Go Through the Belly’ by Carlos Garaicoa (Havana, 1967), curated by Lillebit Fadraga, brings together works from the last five years by the Cuban-Spanish artist, one of the key figures in Latin American art in recent decades, and reviews his main lines of work.
The exhibition is a co-production of Es Baluard Museu with the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Gran Canaria, where it was on display from 20 June to 1 September 2024.
Through around thirty newly created artworks, as well as a selection of his iconic works, Garaicoa reflects on the concept of the city as a symbolic space. References to architecture, urban planning, history or political propaganda in Cuba occupy a prominent place in his work, both formally and in the process of research and reflection that he develops before materialising his creations.
Drawings of buildings, models, blueprints, installations or intervened photographs are the way in which the artist presents themes such as dystopian cities, hopelessness and isolation, the crash of 20th century ideologies or the collapse of contemporary cities.
Lillebit Fadraga, curator of the exhibition, explains that this show ‘brings together works that, while not exclusively, at least constantly, refer to a concern for our place in the natural order. The pandemic and the lockdown also brought the artist a moment of introspection, a return to drawing and to works in which the elements of nature became more obvious and recurrent. In many of the works in this exhibition, the focus has shifted from the usual architectural elements that distinguish his work to vegetation, represented in the image of the tree that grows and at the same time dynamites an already battered building with its roots’.
The exhibition ‘Carlos Garaicoa. All Utopias Go Through the Belly’ can be visited in the Museum’s Exhibition Hall A from 21 September 2024 to 5 January 2025.