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Biography

Alexis Leiva Machado (Kcho) was born in 1970 in Nueva Gerona, on the Isle of Youth, Cuba. He trained at the Elementary School of Art in his hometown and later at the National School of Art (E.N.A.) in Havana, completing his studies in 1990. Since then, he has developed a multidisciplinary practice encompassing drawing, sculpture, painting, and installation, becoming one of the most influential figures in contemporary Cuban art.

Kcho gained international recognition in 1995 after receiving the Grand Prize at the 1st Gwangju Biennale and the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts. That same year, at the age of 25, he became the second Cuban artist to enter the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, after Wifredo Lam, and the youngest Latin American artist to do so. His work is held in major institutional collections, including the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba, MoMA, MOCA Los Angeles, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne, and the Vatican Museums, among others.

Throughout his career, Kcho has participated in leading international biennials such as the Venice Biennale, the Havana Biennial, and the Gwangju Biennale, and has been represented by galleries including Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, and Galería Joan Prats. He maintains a singular institutional relationship with the Vatican, being the first Cuban artist to exhibit there and the artist who has presented the largest number of solo exhibitions in this context, with three individual exhibitions. In 2015, he gifted Pope Francis the sculpture Milagro, popularly known as the “Christ of the Mediterranean.”

Alongside his artistic production, Kcho has developed an ongoing artivist practice in which art functions as a tool for social action and transformation. In 2008, he founded the Martha Machado Artistic Brigade, an initiative that remains active and provides assistance following natural disasters in Cuba and Haiti through housing, education, and cultural projects. Since 2012, he has also led a long-term project for the transformation of the Romerillo neighborhood in Havana, resulting in the creation of Kcho Estudio Romerillo Laboratorio para el Arte and the Museo Orgánico de Romerillo (MOR), an ongoing community-based cultural platform integrating art, education, technology, and public life.

In recent years, his work has continued to receive major institutional recognition, including a retrospective at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba (2020–2021), representation of Cuba at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), and the acquisition of his work by the Centre Pompidou in 2025.

Artistic Statement

My work is articulated around the idea of displacement and the human experience of journeying. The sea, boats, and rafts recur throughout my practice as metaphors of survival, fragility, and hope—structures that hold memory while projecting the possibility of a destination. I work with materials that carry their own histories—reclaimed wood, oars, industrial remnants, and found fragments—integrating them without erasing their past and exploring the poetics of rescue and transformation.

My practice extends beyond the studio into public space and collective experience. The Museo Orgánico and the Martha Machado Artistic Brigade are central projects within my practice and reflect my conviction that art can function as a civic tool, capable of transforming environments, generating social bonds, and expanding shared horizons.