Date
From September 25, 2026 to April 18, 2027
Flavio Garciandía’s presence in Monterrey for more than a decade had a profound impact on the local community, not only through his artistic practice but also through his intellectual work. His oeuvre continues a key line of reflection that emerged at the beginning of the “Cuban avant-garde of the 1980s,” which challenged the strict cultural policies associated with socialist realism on the island in order to generate critical responses to Western culture. Therefore, the work developed over the last three decades can be understood as an ironic, utopian, and unattainable construction of the confrontation between major Western creators and Latin American art.
This important exhibition brings together works ranging from early hyperrealist paintings to installations linked to Caribbean kitsch, including artist books and a wide range of pictorial production in which elements of Latin American cultures engage in an ironic dialogue with the conceptual postulates of artists such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Ryman, and Ad Reinhart, among others.
Curated by Tobías Ostrander
The exhibition is produced by MARCO and funded through the Fiscal Incentive for Investment Projects in Visual Arts Production (EFIARTES), with contributions from 7 Eleven México, Ternium, Grupo Cuprum and Grupo Berel.
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), 2026. Photograph: Arthur Mora
A seminal figure in the history of Cuban art, Flavio Garciandía (b.1954, Caibarién), relocated to Monterrey in 1995, where he played an active role in this artistic community before moving to Mexico City in 2005. He belongs to the first generation of Cuban artists to grow up entirely under communism, and his practice may be understood as consistently in dialogue with the socio-political context in which he was formed as an artist. He organized with a group of artists of the now mythic exhibition “Volumen 1” in 1981, credited with initiating a period of dynamic creativity on the island. His generation wished to expand and internationalize their cultural context, and to creatively challenge the increasingly rigid aesthetics of the communist regime, dominated by Soviet Socialist Realism.
Garciandía developed a practice that engages both popular art and the modernist avant-garde. He is known for dramatic shifts in painting styles, pursing distinct approaches simultaneously. Borrowing from art historical sources with both a critical humor and technical virtuosity, his paintings have often generated post-modern interpretations. His works invite multiple and often contradictory readings, as he explores complex dichotomies. These include “high” and “low” culture, popular taste and rarified formalisms, modernist values placed on originality and the commercial desire for copies, image and text (through his provocative titles), and the expectations imposed on artists working in designated cultural “peripheries” versus “centers.”
For this exhibition, his first national retrospective, the artist has chosen the title Unauthorized Self-Portrait. It reads as both humorous and perplexing. If self-portraits are generated by artists themselves, how or under what conditions could it be possible that they do not give themselves this permission? It nods to self-censorship, not only within a controlled communist context such as Cuba, but within an international art world that structures specific “dos” and “don’ts” for artists coming from the Caribbean, Latin America and the developing world in general. The title also plays with the assumption that a retrospective acts like an extended self-portrait, providing insight into the artist’s personality and core preoccupations, expectations that Garciandía perpetually deflects and confuses through his creative use of fiction and appropriation. These paintings continually keep the viewer guessing about their sincerity, hinting at profound searches for beauty, the sublime, political and transcendental meaning, with all their potential significance perpetually layered behind masks of decorative paint.
