Mark


CONSUELO CASTAÑEDA

Works

Bio

Consuelo Castañeda uses painting, installations, photography, graphic art, architecture, and print to explore the relationship between art and politics in Cuba and in wider Latin America. During the so-called “prodigious decade” of the eighties in Cuba until her emigration to Mexico and then Miami, in the 1990s, she was an active piece on the Cuban art scene and at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). Not only as an artist but as professor and critic as well, she became then a sort of pivotal figure. Her analytical mind together with an eclectic use of a variety of formats have been key elements to her poetics. Appropriation, remixing, reusage are some of the techniques displayed by Castañeda in order to fashion new narratives of both great formal sophistication and subtle irony. Wielded from a Third World country, this postmodern appropriative attitude proposed eroding all historically accepted canons and recycling them for innovative expressive purposes, instilling her conceptual works with a sensitive but objective distance. Her work as a painter, photographer and multimedia installation artist has recently shifted to digital format. Her current focus is on creatin interactive works tha anyone with a modem and a computer can readily access.

Consuelo Castañeda (b. 1958, Havana, Cuba) is based in Miami and Havana. She has participated in several solo and collective exhibitions in USA, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, among other venues. The artist participated in the Havana Biennials in 1984, 1986 and 1991. In 2016, she held a solo show entitled CCC2016in Havana after decades away from the island.