19 july 2022, Flor Linckens
Adrift: destinationless celestial bodies that continuously revolve around their own axis
Until 30 July, TORCH Gallery in Amsterdam is presenting a solo exhibition by Liset Castillo. The Cuban artist's works often symbolise a microcosm and Castillo is known for her complex and metaphorical sculptures and installations in materials such as sand, wood, plexiglass and powder pigments.
Sand in particular plays a central role in the artist's practice. She is interested in the transience that the material symbolises and the ultimately temporary character of the structures that people build. In her practice, the artist focuses on recurring contradictions such as order and chaos, the material and the ephemeral and creation versus destruction. For instance, for an earlier series, she made a series of scale models of architectural monuments out of sand — from the Colosseum and the Great Wall of China to New York's Guggenheim Museum — that eventually perish. In another work she focused on the illusion of suburbia: the false ideal of the American suburbs.
Liset Castillo, Field of Vision, 2022, TORCH Gallery.
For her latest work, she was inspired by the tradition of Japanese Karesansui (dry landscape) gardens, a controlled microcosm that is managed by people. In these works, Castillo centers on Cuban migrants, who have fled the country en masse since 1959 in the hope of a better life. In her pigmented sand paintings, they become lonely and destinationless celestial bodies that continuously revolve around their own axis, separated from their families. Castillo's work is difficult to categorise and often moves between various disciplines such as sculpture, painting and photography.
Liset Castillo, The Hope, 2022, TORCH Gallery.
Castillo was born and educated in Cuba, after which she completed a two-year residency at the prestigious De Ateliers institute in Amsterdam (2000-2002). In 2004, she was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, an annual grant awarded to individuals "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts”. That gave her the opportunity to work in New York for a while. Since 2013, the artist divides her time between Amsterdam and Havana.
Castillo's work has been exhibited at the Havana Biennale and the Brooklyn Museum, among others, and was included in the collections of museums such as The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
