Couturier Gallery will host the return of Cuban painter and sculptor Carlos Estévez for a solo show, September 14 – October 19, 2013, with an artist’s opening reception on Saturday, September 14th, 6-8pm.
The exhibition of new works, Living Apart Together, includes large paintings and intricate sculptures exploring the human psyche vis-Ã -vis a complex artificial world with metaphoric imagery and thoughtful witticism.
Carlos Estévez is from the generation of Cuban artists and intellectuals who, emerging in the 1990s, developed a sense of connectedness to the world outside of Cuba where social, political and geographic boundaries do not exist compared to the restricted freedoms on the island.
Free to develop a symbolic language of his own, Estévez uses images from the physical world to convey his thoughts on isolation and solitude. Present are his trademark mechanical figures: hybrids of man and nature, combined with elements of music, marionettes, architecture and telephones.
Estévez further investigates the study of communication with a series of works featuring rotary dial phones. In the sculpture “Balanced Approach†he combines an elaborate rigging of a metal weight scale with a plated phone base suggesting the value of weighing ones words. “Long Distance Relationships†is a large painting featuring 14 telephones of different styles with human parts representing the modern phenomenon of isolation in a social media and device driven world. He writes of this schism, “My paintings attempt to represent this chaos: the absurdity of life, the lack of communication, the distance between humans.†It is this type of observation that motivates Estévez to delve into his world of symbols and create a visual testimonial to the incongruities of life in a modern age.
Carlos Estévez’s work may be found in numerous museum and public collections including: Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes, La Habana, Cuba; Bronx Museum, New York, USA; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA, USA; Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL, USA; Arizona State University Art Museum, Arizona, USA; Lowe Art Museum, UM, Miami, FL, USA; Drammens Museum for Kunst og Kulturhistorie, Drammens, Norway; The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, FIU, Miami, FL, USA; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA USA; Colección Casa de las Américas, La Habana, Cuba; Center for Cuban Studies, New York, USA; Fundación Arte Viva, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; OMI Foundation Collection, New York, USA; The Farber Collection, New York.
For more information: Couturier Gallery http://www.couturiergallery.com/
