Consuelo Castañeda emerged amid the Cuban avant-garde of the 1980s and has played a pivotal role in shifting popular understanding of the relationship between art and politics across Latin America. She has used wallpaper as a medium throughout her career to intervene and comment on architectural histories.
Walls on Wall repurposed photographs of the iconic baroque church, the Iglesia de Santo Domingo in Chiapas, Mexico. Just as the church’s Spanish iconography was imposed upon an existing indigenous ceremonial space, the artist’s work was a palimpsest of layered histories – a vertical excavation of architecture – a near spiritual experience. As we moved skyward, pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial motifs were re-contextualized on these walls from circa 1930, giving rise to fresh interpretation.
About Consuelo Castañeda
Castañeda (b. Havana, 1958) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Miami and has participated in exhibitions at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, The Americas Society, Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Bronx Museum of the Arts and more