CARLOS GARAICOA

Rituals and Liberty presents a suite of five reliefs integrating painting and photography, and a series of sculpturalmodels incorporating nineteenth-century French engravings as material. Collectively, these works extendGaraicoa’s longstanding interest in urbanism, in particular how the city and its architecture reflect and shapesociety.

Born and raised in Havana, Cuba, Garaicoa is a graduate of the city’s Instituto Superior de Arte. He forms part of an extraordinary cohort of Cuban artists who emerged during the so-called “Special Period in a Time of Peace” in the early 1990s. Not dissimilar to present-day Cuba, this period was marked by economic instability and food shortages following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of subsidies to the island.

Garaicoa’s earliest artistic projects consisted of happenings and anonymous interventions in Havana and were informed by his interest in the writings of cultural theorist Roland Barthes. “Initially my work started from an interest in the city and the search for a new language, for a possible way of escaping from the stale traditional mechanisms of artistic practice,” he explained in 2005. His work using non-traditional materials actively sought to build new audiences outside the gallery and museum.

Garaicoa gradually shifted from site-specific interventions to photography and drawing, later incorporating sculpture, video and architectural models into his extensive repertoire. Based since 2007 in Madrid, with an active studio in Cuba, Garaicoa is widely recognised for his decoding and recoding of urban infrastructures. Writing in 2010, curator Okwui Enwezor described him as “one of the most significant artists of his generation to develop a sustained aesthetic and analytical framework that would fuse the heritage of modern Cuban art and its complex political structure.” Garaicoa’s connection to South Africa is longstanding. He participated in the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995. Two years later, he realised a land art intervention in Cuito Cuanavale, a site in south-eastern Angola associated with the 1987–88 Cold War battle involving Cuban and South African military forces. The work addressed historical amnesia in Cuba concerning its involvement in Angola.

Since meeting Goodman Gallery owner Liza Essers in Havana, he has frequently exhibited with the gallery, notably in the group exhibition Structures (Cape Town, 2013). Rituals and Liberty follows on his well-received solo exhibition Scratched Surfaces, as Diamond against Crystal (London, 2021) with the gallery, and forms part of a wider programme to showcase challenging and dynamic practices by leading artists from Latin America.

The reliefs in Garaicoa’s ongoing series π = 3.1416 (2023–2025) extend his interest in abstraction. Overlapping scalloped and steepled forms employ geometric patterning to explore concrete proportions. On one level, these compositions reflect the legacy of Russian avant-garde movement as well as earlier South American artists, including painters Gregorio Vardanega and Carmelo Arden Quin, and sculptor Lygia Pape, a leading figure of the Neo-Concrete movement in Brazil, whose work Garaicoa admires. Materially, these reliefs recall assemblage painting and possess a pronounced haptic quality.

Remarking on Garaicoa’s reliefs, Cuban art historian and curator Osbel Suárez characterises them as “works in transit” that blur the “boundaries between the pictorial and the sculptural, placing us in an ambiguous, hard-to-define territory.” Alongside these painted works, the exhibition includes two new reliefs incorporating photography, a medium that functions both as a research tool and as a surrogate for drawing. Garaicoa describes photography as “an indispensable methodology in my work.” As with architectural professionals who shape public space, sketching and modelling remain central to Garaicoa’s practice. These paper models from the ongoing The Old and The New series (2010–) incorporate nineteenth-century French engravings found in Lisbon, many of which depict architectural, engineering or carpentry structures, complementing earlier pieces in the same series that featured garden structures, animal shelters, churches or theaters.

Much in the same way that Garaicoa’s reliefs blur the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional forms, Garaicoa has reworked his source material into delicate paper constructions using a technique linked to an earlier series of pop-up book works. His models include contemporary structures in black card. The resulting tableaux is at once historical and speculative, further extending his search for a new language with which to evoke the city as a shared human condition.

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Carlos Garaicoa (b. Havana, 1967) studied thermodynamics andlater painting at the Instituto Superior de Arte de La Habana (1989– 1994). Among his most recent solo presentations are: JardimFrágil (Site-specific work and pavillion), Usina de Arte, Água Preta,Pernambuco, Brazil (2025); Toda utopía pasa por la barriga, CentroAtlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Gran Canaria and Es BaluardMuseu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, Spain (2024); Ascoltare ilvolo degli uccelli, Rocca Maggiore, Assisi, Italy (2024); Soñamosen la superficie rayada de un cristal (installation), WellbeingSummit Week, Bilbao, Spain (2022); Partitura, PEM Peadoby EssexMuseum, Salem, USA (2021). Other solo shows have been presentedat SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2020); Lunds Konsthalland Skissernass Museum, Lund (2019); Parasol Unit Foundation,London (2018); Fondazione Merz, Turin (2017); MAAT, Lisbon (2017);Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao (2017); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2016);Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (2015); CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo,Móstoles, Madrid (2014); Fundación Botín, Santander (2014). He hasparticipated in prestigious international events such as: HavanaBiennials, São Paulo, Venice, Johannesburg, Liverpool, Shanghai,Moscow and Vevey; the Triennials of Yokohama, Echigo-Tsumari,Auckland and San Juan; Documenta 11 and 14 and PhotoEspaña12.He received the PEM 2021 Award (Peabody Essex Museum,Salem, USA). In 2005 he received the XXXIX International Prize forContemporary Art – Prince Pierre de Monaco Foundation, and theKatherine S. Marmor Award in Los Angeles.