Alexandre Arrechea

ALEXANDRE ARRECHEA

Born in Trinidad, Cuba in 1970. Lives and works between Cuba and Madrid.

EDUCATION

1994 Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), Havana, Cuba

SOLO SHOW

2010 Ideational Arquitecture, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, LA Elasticity, Magnanmetz Gallery, New York City, NY Galeria Casado Santapau, Madrid 2009 Todo, Algo, Nada, CAB, Burgos, Spain 2008 American University Museum at the Katzen, Washington D.C. USA 2007 Espacio Derrotado, Casado-Santa Pau Gallery, Madrid, Spain Sweet Fear, Alonso Art, Miami, Florida. U.S.A Contemporary Links, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, U.S.A. 2006 Taipei Biennial, Taipei, China Perpetual Free Entrance, Patio Herreriano, Museo de Arte contemporaneo Español, Valladolid, Spain The Limit, Mary Goldman Gallery, LA,California, Usa 2005 Dust, Magnan Projects, New York, Usa Polvo, Miramar Trade Center, La Habana, Cuba Nada Art Fair, Mary Goldman Gallery. Pulse, Magnan Projects, Miami Nowhere, Alonso Fine Art, Miami, Usa Raúl Cordero, Felipe Dulzaides, Alexandre Arrechea en la Casa de las Américas, Casa de las Americas, La Habana,Cuba 2004 Dos nuevos espacios, Espacio Aglutinador, La Habana, Cuba Arte público, Mark Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, Ca, Usa Sudor, Proyecto de arte público, Havana, Cuba 2003 Novos Desenhos, Galeria Fortes-Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil 2002 Ciudad Transportable, Contemporary Art Museum of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 2001 Túneles Populares, Palacio de Abrahante, Salamanca, Spain Los Carpinteros, Galería Camargo-Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil Ciudad Transportable, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, Usa Los Carpinteros, Grant Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, Ca, Usa Ciudad Transportable, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Ca, Usa Los Carpinteros, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, Ca, Usa 2000 Los Carpinteros, Grant Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, Ca, Usa 1999 Tania Bruguera/Los Carpinteros, Vera Van Laer Galerie, Antwerp, Belgium 1998 Los Carpinteros, Project Room, Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo, Arco ‘98, Parque Ferial Juan Carlos I, Madrid, Spain Mecánica Popular, Galería Habana, Havana, Cuba Los Carpinteros, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Kunsthalle, Berlin, Germany Bili Bidjocka/Los Carpinteros/ Rivane Neuenschwander, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, Usa Los Carpinteros, Iturralde Gallery, Los Angeles, Ca, Usa 1997 Construimos el puente para que cruce la gente, construimos paredes para que el sol no llegue, Galería Angel Romero, Madrid, Spain Viejos métodos para nuevas deudas, Convento de San Francisco de Asís, Havana, Cuba Los Carpinteros/Carlos Estévez/Offil Industrial, Galería Nina Menocal, Mexico City, Mexico 1996 Todo ha sido reducido a la mitad del original, Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro, Havana, Cuba ISHMAEL1995 RANDALLLos Carpinteros. WEEKS Obra Reciente, Galería Angel Romero, Madrid, Spain MERCADO, 2008 FRUIT CASES, MIRRORS,Se vende 2008 tierra de Cuba, L’Entrepot Pour Matériel Pharmaceutique, Nates, France VARIABLE DIMENSIONSIngeniería Civil, Galería Habana, Havana, Cuba FEDERICA SCHIAVO GALLERY PIAZZA MONTEVECCHIO 16 ROMA GROUP SHOW

2010 “Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?” Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome, Italy. Curated by Ishmael Randall-Weeks Black Sun, NASDAQ Billboard, Alexandre Arrechea and Sofia Maldonado in Times Square, New York 2009 10 Bienal de la Habana, Cuba 2 Thassaloniki Biennal, Greece 2008 Prospect I, Biennal of new Orleans (curated by Dan Cameron) Cuba, artists experience their country. Hunterdon Art Museum, new Jersey, USA; Museo iego Rivera, Mexico The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Fontanals-Cisneros (CIFO) Collection, Miami 2007 New Perspectives in Latin American Art, MOMA, NY Tomorrow. Artsonje Center, Seoul, Korea We Are Your Future, Special Project to the 2nd Moscow Biennale of the Fine Arts Caribbean Encounters, Brooklyn Museum, Ny, Usa 2006 Fatamorgana, Ilusion and deception in Contemporary Art, Haifa Museum of Art, Israel Moving Image, Alonso Art, Miami, Florida, Usa Stop & Forward, Galeria Habana, Cuba Volta Show 2Ultra Brga, Basel, Switzerland 2005 51a Bienal de Venecia, Italy Out of place-works on paper, Mary Goldman Gallery, La, Ca. Usa Scope: Contemporary Cuban Video/Film, Group show, Magnan project Gallery Ny, Usa. Curator Judy Cheung. Co-presented by May Works Festival Calgary and Emmedia Gallery Salon de arte contemporaneo, Centro de desarrollo de las artes visuales, La Habana, Cuba 2004 Video rampage: Resurrected!, Video In, Vancouver,Canada Video In Studios/Satellite Video Exchange Society 1965 Main Street Vancouver, B.C., Canada Ay, Mami!, Programe of Cuban video at the Liverpool Biennal, Liverpool, England Festival of independent Film & Video, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 2003 Stretch, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada Kaap Helder, Oude Rijkswerf Willemsoord (ORW), Den Helder, Holland Sentido Común, Galería Habana, Havana, Cuba Dreamspaces-Entresueños, Deutsche Bank Lobby Gallery, New York, USA Rest in Space, Kunstlerhaus, Bethanien, Berlin, Germany 2002 Shangai Biennale, Shangai Art Museum, Shangai, China Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Usa Rest in Space, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway Dwelling Project, Gallery Optica, Montreal, Canada With Eyes of Stone and Water, Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland The 25th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil 2001 Valencia, Valencia, Spain 2000 Playgroung & Toys. An International Project for Art for the World, Geneva/Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum, Rome/New York (traveling show) 7ma Bienal de La Habana, Fortaleza de la Cabaña, Havana, Cuba 1999 Arte Cubano, Obra sobre papel, Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid, Spain 1998 Trasatlántico, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan/The Garden of Forking Paths, Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen, Denmark/Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, Aalborg, Denmark, Edsvik Konst & Kultur, Sollentuna, Sweden, Helsinki City Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland The Edge of Awareness, WHO’s Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland, PS1, New York, USA, SESC de Pompeia, São Paulo, Brazil, New Delhi, India, Triennale di Milano, Milan, Italy CRIA’s Latin Art Sale, Generous Miracles Gallery, New York, Usa Caribe Insular. Exclusión, Fragmentación y Paraíso, Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz, Casa de America, Madrid, Spain Barro de América, III Bienal Latinoamericana de Arte, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela La Dirección de la Mirada, Stadhaus, Zurich, Musée de Beaux Arts, La Chaux-des-Fonds, Switzerland Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island, Arizona State University. ASU Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, Usa, 1997 New Art from Cuba: Utopian Territories, Morris and Helken, Belkin Art Gallery/National Gallery, Vancouver, Canada The Rest of the World, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany

FEDERICA SCHIAVO GALLERY PIAZZA MONTEVECCHIO 16 ROMA ALEXANDRE ARRECHEA BY GABRIELA SALGADO, THESSALONIKI BIENNAL 2009, GREECE

An early interest in architecture was already manifest in the works that he made as a participant in the collective Los Carpinteros /The Carpenters, of which he was part since the trio’s student days in the Cuban Art School, in the 1990s, and has developed through his solo career which began in 2003. The highly elaborate wooden sculptures that became Los Carpinteros’ trademark gave way to a more personal language that allows Arrechea to explore mechanisms of control and the silenced but lethal presence of fear and mistrust in social relations. An example of this is his emblematic sculpture El Jardín de la Desconfianza/The Garden of Mistrust (2005), a life size sculpture of a tree whose branches are equipped with foliage made of CCTV cameras that follow the passerby, recording their movements into a database.

In keeping with this Foucaultian approach, his drawings refer to the discomfort produced by the demise of utopian social models and their authoritarian formulas by means of distorted scale and the displacement of signs from the realm of dreams to the stage of the modern city. Employing watercolor in large format drawings of buildings, bridges and other architectural typologies, he creates a theatre of the absurd, where the intellectual heritage of socialism and its consequent contradictions are at play.

His latest video, Black Sun, premiered in Thessaloniki, marries the instability of the animated image of a wrecking ball in the moment of destruction with the apparent solidity of the setting: a large wall receiving the impact of a virtual ball. Here, the work acquires a new dimension as the image is projected over one of the remaining fragments of the original Byzantine wall that surrounded the city providing protection. As if an occurrence proper of Second Life, the psychological impact provoked by this unstable marriage of support and image revives the anxiety of the inevitable failure of violence, and of the failure of power to survive its own fears.

ALEXANDRE ARRECHEA BIENAL DE LA HABANA 2009, CUBA

Alexandre Arrechea made his name as part of Los Carpinteros. Which is to say he made his name disappear along with those of his fellow Carpinteros, Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés and Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez. The three artists began working behind their collective moniker back in 1994, and they became phenomenally, and anonymously, successful. The New York Museum of Modern Art, which acquired several of their drawings for the museum’s permanent collection starting in the late 1990s, describes Los Carpinteros as follows: “Through collective authorship, the group members engage in labor that is itself opposed to...the ideology of individual artistic genius.”

So when Arrechea decided to leave Los Carpinteros in July 2003, the question was: How do you set out on your own after you’ve spent a decade opposing the ideology of individual artistic genius? Answer: it isn’t easy, but if you work hard enough things will start to fall into place. Arrechea’s first solo project was “El Jardin de la Desconfianza” (The Garden of Mistrust), an epic installation in Los Angeles that required two years (2003-2005) from conception to completion. The central piece of the work was a whitewashed aluminum tree whose branches were outfitted with video cameras - “surveillance cameras,” as Arrechea saw it - which recorded spectators and broadcast them on the Internet.

“Mechanisms of vigilance and control” - that’s how Arrrechea describes the major focus of his solo work up to and including “La habitación de todos” (The Room of All, 2009), his project for the 10th Havana Biennial. The timeliness of this piece is astounding. It’s a sculpture of a house that expands or contracts according to, respectively, the rise or fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Index. “Each point of rise or fall of the Dow Jones Industrial will reflect in greater or lesser spaciousness of the rooms of the house,” Arrechea explained in an email shortly before the Biennial got under way.

While his work typically resonates with contemporary meaning, it can also be amusing. Or alarming. Or both at once. Like the giant wooden hand grenade he made with Los Carpinteros. Or his photograph of a black man struggling to carry a load of white bricks that hide his face and obscure his identity.

A good example of just how far he will go in search of relevance is “Mississippi Bucket,” a 32-by-28-foot sculture he installed in a New Orleans public square in 2008. “This piece is a large-scale bucket carved in the shape of the Mississippi River made out of local driftwood from the river itself,” Arrechea explains. “It is a metaphorical reminder that what happened in New Orleans [the levee breaking and Hurricane Katrina] affected the world and relates to all of us.”

Alexandre Arrechea was born in 1970 in Trinidad, Cuba, and graduated from Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in 1994. At the time of our interview he was shuttling between New York - where he is planning an ambitious public art project involving video projections on buildings - and Madrid, where he lives with his wife, Cuban art historian Madeline Arrechea and their two small children, Dalia and Arturo. During the Havana Biennial Alexandre was showing his paintings (yes, he paints) in a Vedado apartment situated about 10 blocks from another apartment where he and his family eat and sleep when they’re in town.

As busy as he was during the Biennial, Arrechea seemed to be in fine spirits every time we ran into him, always quick to flash a warm smile. In contrast to the icy topicality of his best conceptual work, Arrechea has the sunny disposition of someone who has worked hard to make things fall into place, and who is now fortunate enough to watch them do just that.

FEDERICA SCHIAVO GALLERY PIAZZA MONTEVECCHIO 16 ROMA ALEXANDRE ARRECHEA

CAPITOL, 2010 watercolor on paper (Arches 300 grams) 114 x 170 cm

ALMOST EMPTY RED LINE, 2005 watercolor on paper (Arches 300 grams) 230 x 10 cm

The work of Alexandre Arrechea is rooted in the scrutiny of power structures. The visual manifestation of this reflection is constructed as a highly aesthetic display of surreal architectures and the absurd engineering of impossible mechanical devises as if born out of the set of a science fiction B movie. An early interest in architecture was already manifest in the works that he made as a participant in the collective Los Carpinteros. The highly elaborate wooden sculptures that became Los Car- pinteros’ trademark gave way to a more personal language that allows Arrechea to explore mechanisms of control and the silenced but lethal presence of fear and mistrust in social relations. An example of this is his emblematic sculpture El Jardín de la Desconfianza/The Garden of Mistrust (2005), a life size sculpture of a tree whose branches are equipped with foliage made of CCTV cameras that follow the passerby, recording their movements into a database. In keeping with this Foucaultian approach, his drawings refer to the discomfort produced by the demise of utopian social models and their authoritarian formulas by means of distorted scale and the displacement of signs from the realm of dreams to the stage of the modern city. Employing watercolour in large format drawings of buildings, bridges and other architectural typologies, he creates a theatre of the absurd, where the intellectual heritage of socialism and its consequent contradictions are at play.

FEDERICA SCHIAVO GALLERY PIAZZA MONTEVECCHIO 16 ROMA