Solo exhibition “Desideri di luce. Rifrazioni” Galleria e Museo San Fedele. Curated by Andrea Dall'Asta SJ - 5 April - 25 May
miart April 12 - 14, 2024
VIP preview April 11, 2024 upon invitation
Allianz MiCo, Pavilion 3
viale Scarampo, Milan
Solo exhibition “Desideri di luce. Rifrazioni” Galleria e Museo San Fedele. Curated by Andrea Dall'Asta SJ - 5 April - 25 May
miart April 12 - 14, 2024
VIP preview April 11, 2024 upon invitation
Allianz MiCo, Pavilion 3
viale Scarampo, Milan
A cura di Andrea Dall'Asta SJ - 5 Aprile - 25 Maggio Inagurazione 4 Aprile via Hoepli 3A, Milano
All requests contact Wizard Gallery
In this 120 full color pages book, 5 renowned art critics, curators, and writers come together to explore the work of Hernández and its relationship with Cuba and the sea. Framing his art within the context of art history, these experts provide valuable insights and analysis. The collaboration of these five individuals ensures a comprehensive and nuanced examination of Hernández's work.
★★★★★Diango is trying to find languages that speak to that distance and bridge that distance. It's deeply aesthetic, it's invariably absolutely beautiful, but underlying it is this kind of strong engagement with place and lack of place.
★★★★★Hernandez’s sculptures meanwhile seem up-to-minute artefacts from our hyperconnected digital islands of isolation. Hyperreal in finish and form, they are visitors from another realm in which humans are, at best, vulgar tourists. Within the logic of Instopia they function as pirate flags asserting the sovereignty of the artistic imagination to roam where it pleases, passing through thresholds and across all territories, taking and using what it wants.
★★★★★The art of Diango Hernández defies easy categorization. Although much of his work is inspired by his experiences of Cuba – where he was born in 1970 and lived until the age of 33 – he is not an émigré artist in the vein of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Joseph Brodsky. And while many of his projects are concerned with displacement and origin, his work does not sit comfortably within the genre of diasporic art. Hernández makes Conceptual art yet carefully constructs pieces by hand like a craftsman. He is as much an inventor drawing up plans for alternative systems as he is an explorer mapping out newly discovered territories.
★★★★★In Diango Hernández's artistic practice, drawing began as a form of resistance and mental survival, a way of collecting, recording, understanding, perceiving and filtering a lost reality in the post-revolutionary period of his native Cuba, to become a form of articulation and projection of concepts and ideas guided by the energy of utopia.The long-term installations that he builds project after project propose free and rigorous visions as only drawing, freed from an exclusive and narrow function of representation, can create.
★★★★★Hernández first solo exhibition in Cologne without the Ordo Amoris Cabinet in 2003, which was entitled “Amateur” at Frehrking Wiesehöfer presented 5.000 drawings together with objects, which seemed to have been realized quickly and had a precarious status because they were extremely fragile. Some of them looked like radios or other everyday objects but which were not functioning. Though I am sceptical about heroic narrations postulating that some exhibitions in an artist’s career are more important than others I would say that “Amateur” was crucial for Diango because it was a turning point in finding a very specific language as an artist. At least that is why I suggested starting Hernández survey at MART, Rovereto with a room of drawings from "Amateur".
selected public collections
Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany | The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA | Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, Germany | Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany | PAMM, Miami, USA | Artpace, San Antonio, USA | Museum of Fine Art Huston, Huston, USA | Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany | Kunstsammlung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany | INHOTIM, Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Belo Horizonte, Brazil | PHILARA Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany | MART Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy | CAB de Burgos, Burgos, Spain | Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France | Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein | Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany | Rheingold Collection, Düesseldorf, Germany | Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Germany | Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Leon, (MUSAC), Spain | Colección Bergé, Madrid, Spain.