Exhibiciones

Un nuevo mundo was presented at the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Vatican City, reflecting Kcho’s aspiration to position artistic practice in relation to broader human and social values.

The exhibition engaged with ideas of responsibility, collective consciousness, and the role of art in contributing to a shared future — themes aligned with contemporary dialogues between art, ethics, and society. Presented in the context of an institutional collaboration between the Embassy of Cuba to the Holy See and the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, the project emphasized the capacity of artistic practice to operate within humanitarian and cultural frameworks.

Kcho. Resurrección brought together approximately thirty paintings addressing migration — a recurring theme in the artist’s practice across different media. Presented at the Palazzo della Cancelleria, the exhibition explored migration as a human, political, and emotional condition, situating individual stories within broader collective narratives. The works reflected Kcho’s ongoing engagement with displacement, memory, and the search for belonging.

Framed within an institutional collaboration between the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Embassy of Cuba to the Holy See, the exhibition positioned artistic practice as a space for reflection on solidarity, social responsibility, and shared human experience.

The project also continued Kcho’s sustained dialogue with Vatican cultural institutions, following previous exhibitions addressing migration and humanitarian themes.

Curator: Eriberto Bettini

This exhibition brought together works by Bruce Nauman and Kcho, combining pieces from the MCA Collection with works by contemporary artists less familiar to Chicago audiences at the time.

Since the mid-1960s, Nauman has explored questions of self-definition through conceptual strategies that challenge traditional notions of artistic production. His sculptures Three Dead-End Adjacent Tunnels, Not Connected and Rats and Bats (Learned Helplessness in Rats) II evoke psychological isolation while investigating personal identity.

In dialogue with these works, Kcho presented sculptures such as "Lo Mejor del Verano" and "Archipiélago en mi Pensamiento", reflecting his sustained engagement with themes of isolation, insularity, and transformation. Growing up on an island off the coast of Cuba, Kcho addresses the condition of geographic and symbolic isolation through a poetic and materially grounded language.

Archipelago in my Thoughts

1997

Click to view

Kcho. The Infinite Column brought together large-scale sculptures and installations developed around the conceptual axis that the artist explored over a decade: the idea of the infinite column.

Presented at the Palacio de Cristal in Retiro Park, the exhibition featured monumental works constructed through repetition, modest materials, and handcrafted processes, establishing a dialogue with the legacy of Constantin Brancusi while articulating Kcho’s own sculptural language.

For this project, Kcho produced two site-specific works — Como la espuma and Ideas mojadas (a reworking of El camino de la nostalgia, 1994–1999). Installed in relation to the surrounding water, the works formed a symbolic path toward utopia, culminating in a central vertical structure evoking a column of water.

The exhibition emphasized recurring themes in Kcho’s practice: the sea as landscape and metaphor, migration, memory, and the condition of insularity. Boats, ladders, and assembled structures — including works such as Archipiélago de mi pensamiento — operated as metaphors for journey, impossibility of escape, and the persistence of memory.

Working with found materials collected along coastlines and urban environments — wood, rope, clothing, glass — Kcho foregrounds processes of reuse and transformation. The handcrafted dimension of the work reflects a culture of adaptation in which objects acquire new meanings beyond their original function.

Across the exhibition, the notion of transformation — that nothing is permanent — is central. Works such as A los ojos de la historia (1995), referencing Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, position architecture and sculpture as metaphors for utopia and unresolved futures.

This group exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou offered a focused exploration of contemporary drawing through works by various artists, including Kcho, connected by the centrality of the medium within their practices.

Based on the Daniel and Florence Guerlain Collection — one of the most significant collections dedicated to contemporary drawing — the exhibition reaffirmed the relevance of drawing as a fundamental artistic practice.

For Kcho, drawing represents the origin of his creative process: the first gesture of an idea that often evolves into large-scale sculptures and installations. The work that entered the Pompidou collection is not only a piece in its own right, but also the conceptual starting point for one of his sculptural works.