Karina Aguilera Skvirsky (Rhode Island, USA, 1967) is a multidisciplinary Ecuadorian and Jewish-American artist based in New York. Through video, performance, and photography, her practice navigates broader questions of place, identity, and nationhood. Her main subjects of interest are abstraction, politics, humor, feminism, and history. With her work, she has explored social topics such as the African diaspora, the complexities of indigeneity, and the legacies of colonialism.

Her work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows in renowned galleries and museums, highlighting, among them: Museo de la Ciudad, Cuenca, Ecuador (2021), Photoville, The Clemente, NY, USA (2021), Museo Amparo, Puebla, MX (2019), Centro de la imagen, CDMX (2018), The Deutsche Bank, NY, USA (2018), Ponce + Robles Gallery, Madrid, Spain (2017), The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2016), Instituto Cervantes, Rome, Italy (2013), The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ, USA (2013), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT, USA (2007), El Museo del Barrio, NY, USA (2006), and Sara Meltzer Gallery, NY, USA (2006).

Throughout her career, she has been recognized with various grants from such as Anonymous Was A Woman (2019), The National Association of Latino Arts & Culture (NALAC, (2018), Jerome Foundation Fellowship (2015), Fulbright Scholar Program (2015), Puffin Foundation, Teaneck, NJ (2006), among others.

She currently lives and works between New York and Ecuador.

DOWNLOAD CV

Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Plata, Argentina, 1981) is an artist best known for her language-based works who calls herself a dishonest researcher.

Through extensive research work, from art history to popular music, from literature to street culture, her work brings together diverse figures from the past and present, and reflects on their dissident trajectories including their voices, forms, texts, traces and memories in a multi-layered work. Far from falling into cold reverence or archival fascination, her work successfully addresses the body with all its defects and potential embracing its fragility, as well as its capacity for resistance and care.

Azpilicueta’s practice has recently evolved towards exploring the theatrical possibilities of sculpture and installation. Disguised as sculptures, her pieces should not be taken for granted, as they have the potential to be activated in various ways such as scores, sets, props, mnemonic devices or records.

DOWNLOAD CV

Matthias Bitzer's (Stuttgart, Germany, 1975)  work is poetic and enigmatic, combining figurative painting with abstraction and ornamental geometries. His passion for literature, poetry, and science produce an optical network that connects gaps in our perception of time and space. His source of inspiration derives from a broad range of often forgotten historical figures, including Emily Dickinson.

Bitzer's unique artistic language is based on formal and conceptual themes that diverge between abstraction and figuration. He references artists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Lászlò Moholy Nagy or Oskar Schlemmer. Nevertheless, his work goes beyond what his predecessors explored.

Bitzer unfolds a new perspective on modernism by creating a visual cosmos that immerses the viewer in a world of figuration in geometric patterns, overlapped images, and abstraction. In that sense, Bitzer is concerned with identity as an existential stance and constantly unveils the fragility of what we take as “truth."

He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

DOWNLOAD CV

Through an often subversive and informal practice, Marcelo Cicade (São Paulo, Brazil, 1979) questions the ideals of modernist architecture, appropriates urban spaces, and, by means of various aesthetic operations, invents new idioms, constructing fresh and surprising spaces.

The intimate bond that, for Cidade, holds together art and life authorizes the artist to explore the continual oscillating flow between the social and the personal sphere. Comparing established social relations and values, Cidade creates works that express complex social conflicts and brings signs and situations from the street into art-specific spaces. The artist’s work emphasizes an encounter between art and society, without neglecting the discussion of language.

One of Cidade’s interests is the public space generated in the urban and technological flux of the surveillance society. The city is the privileged site of events, and it is here that the artist looks for his work materials. Streets, walls, flyovers, squares, and shutters are a challenge for his gaze. 

He currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

DOWNLOAD CV

Sheila Hicks (Hastings, USA, 1934) received BFA and MFA degrees from the Yale School of Art. Awarded a Fulbright scholarship to paint in Chile, she photographed indigenous weavers and archeological sites in the Andes beginning an investigation into fiber as an artistic medium that Hicks continues to this day.

Hicks’ earliest weaving exhibitions took place at Galeria Antonio Souza and The Art Institute of Chicago. Numerous solo exhibitions followed at Galerie Bab Rouah, Rabat, Morocco, Stedelijk Museum, Lunds Konsthall and many more. A major retrospective, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, debuted at the Addison Gallery of American Art and traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia as well as the Mint Museum.

Hicks has created monumental site-specific works for the Ford Foundation Headquarters, the Federal Courthouse in New York, The Duke Endowment Fund, King Saud University, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton among others.

She has resided and worked in Paris since 1964.

DOWNLOAD CV

Jesús Rafael Soto (Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, 1923 - Paris, France, 2005) was an influential and central figure of post-war global modernism. He participated in the group exhibition Le mouvement (1955), at the Denise René Gallery in Paris, one of the foundational moments of the style. Throughout his career, he was prominent for the redefinition of the social role of art, rooted in wide research about the spatial-temporal quality of the artistic object.

Soto studied Fine Arts in Caracas, then he moved to Paris in 1950, where he became a part of the international group of artists that sought to renew the experimental art scene. Even though he has been commonly associated with Op Art, Soto’s work is rather characterized by the continuous study of movement and the dematerialization of the form, producing kinetic constructions where the active participation of the spectator is fundamental.

In 1958 he began Vibraciones, a series consisting of the overlap, in various levels, of grids and mobile objects that create infinite possibilities of vibrations and variations. Soto managed to create works accessible to all people, without marking the differences of age or cultural capital of the public, appealing to the very experience of the viewer in relation to the artistic object.

DOWNLOAD CV

Magali Lara (Mexico City, Mexico, 1956) has a degree in Visual Arts for Plastic Expression from the University of Guadalajara and a Master of Arts from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos. With more than 40 years of work, the visual artist, manager, and academic has developed a multidisciplinary practice that explores issues related to the unconscious, everyday life, emotions, the body, the feminine, and the "otherness".

Influenced by the women painters of the Mexican school, such as Maria Izquierdo, Olga Costa, and Frida Kahlo, Magali Lara takes up an interest in still life, objects, and dreamlike atmospheres. These elements are used to compose a unique symbolic language that she has brought to the fields of animation, drawing, writing, ceramics, the artist's book, painting, and textiles. Mainly associated with Conceptual art, Magali Lara has been constantly working on a "poetics" that talks about the body, intimacy, desire, motherhood, childhood, sexuality, and everyday life; all this from a perspective of "femininity" that she recognizes as inexorable. Starting from the ordinary and the visceral of the human body allows her to make a review of the human condition, something that the artist considers essential in the social function of art.

Since the nineties, she has worked at the Facultad de Artes de la Universidad Autónoma de Morelos. She is currently part of the Academic Body of the Master's Degree in art production and participates as a jury in several biennials and artistic production, and as a study plan advisor in various arts education institutions. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores FONCA, which she accessed for the seventh time in the 2020-2023 period. In 2019 she received the Medal of Merit in Arts from Mexico City’s Congress.

She currently lives and works in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

DOWNLOAD CV

Francisco Muñoz’s (Tlaxcala, Mexico, 1986) multidisciplinary practice includes sculpture, drawing, collage, painting, textiles, and installations. He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, La Esmeralda, in Mexico City, and later at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Lyon, as part of an artistic fellowship program. His work is placed in the questioning and analysis of national identities, especially in aesthetic terms. The artist is originally from Tlaxcala, a crucial place in the imaginary produced by the official history of Mexico regarding the period of the Conquest. In that sense, Muñoz approaches pre-Columbian images and symbols as a part of present-day speeches that are necessary to question and explore.

One of the main axes of his work is the relationship that objects have with different contexts and how their meanings can be reordered through material modifications, conceptual associations, or painting interventions. The possibilities represented by the adaptation of objects to different environments are key to Muñoz’s practice: the identity of each piece is based on multiplicity, on the encounter between its “original” meanings and those it assimilates, both in the process of artistic work and at the point of encounter with its viewers. This syncretism directly connects the conceptual with the material, a line on which his work unfolds. Muñoz's work can be found in the Alain Servais Collection (Belgium) and in various private collections in Mexico.

He currently lives and works in Mexico City.

DOWNLOAD CV

Diego Pérez’s (Mexico City, Mexico, 1975) multidisciplinary practice continuously plays with the idea of the border, be they the limits that divide art from other sorts of objects, those that divide art from the wider public, or those that separate contemplation from experimentation. The artist articulates a sculptural imagination in which every material is an endless source of forms whose relationships do not end in the work, but extend to the environment and the viewer.

Beginning his career in the field of photography, Pérez has oriented his work towards the public life of objects, fomenting, not without a degree of humor and an affinity for fantasy, an inquiry about social relationships that give works meaning. It is in everyday life where a chair becomes a shelf, or where a box transforms into a plant pot; the art-life border is constituted and dissolved in the conjunction of public space, work and spectator.

For Pérez, it is important to let imagination and daydreaming flow, because that is where the contact between apparently separate fields is produced between artist and artisan, connoisseur, casual observer and so on.

He currently lives and works in Mexico City.

DOWNLOAD CV

Felipe Pantone (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1986) began his practice as a teenager, making graffiti in Torrevieja, in the south of Spain. Calligraphy and typography, the fundamental focus of graffiti, were the platform from which the artist undertook the development of an abstract or geometric visual language that aims to be both accessible and democratic, parallel to current technological speech. Pantone's work maintains a historical connection with current production methods and with the visual references of the hyper-connected and digitized society. His work is a meditation on the ways in which we consume visual information in current times.

Abstraction is first used as stylistic branding and then poured towards the references of the present time full of infographics, statistics, and visual representations of data that synthesize realities into quickly understandable formats. With this, Pantone reflects on the impact of the digital revolution and global communication on the constitution of the contemporary subject. In today’s accelerated world of industrial production with light, color or previously impossible visual experiences, Pantone recognizes chromatic combinations —such as the glitch or technological failure— as visual experiences linked to contemporary culture. The result is a language that moves between technology and the fine arts, taken to several applications.

Among his most outstanding public installations are the murals commissioned by the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France; the mosaic at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain; the murals in two buildings of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico; the mural Optichromie at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, USA and the mural 300,000 Km/s on Faria Lima Avenue in São Paulo, Brazil.

He currently lives and works in Valencia, Spain.

DOWNLOAD CV

From the interactions between drawing, writing, editing, publishing, performing, collecting and sounding, the artistic practice of Pedro Zylbersztajn (São Paulo, Brazil, 1993) investigates the circular relationship between image, language, protocols of everydayness, technology, and authority. His research employs strategies of reading with the intention of defamiliarizing the way in which commonplace devices are used to build and enforce specific (and sometimes violent) relations between the different realities that surround us. With that, he seeks to create altered relational spaces, which are more reliant on ambiguity and negotiation.

Zylbersztajn holds a Master’s degree from the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (USA), and was a Postgraduate Fellow at the Art by Translation research program (France, 2019-2021). He has participated in exhibitions, fairs, panels, and publications internationally, among which is the solo show As if i were the photographer: Carlos Amadeu Gouvêa, 1971 (Casamata, Rio de Janeiro, 2016), the performance brickwork (Americas Society Visual Arts, New York, 2018); and the group exhibitions Trembling Thinking (Americas Society, NY, 2018) and Time Capsule 2045 (Palais des Beaux-arts de Paris, FR, 2021, Musée d’Art et Histoire de Genève, CH, 2022). He was also part of the 2022 FRONT Triennial, Cleveland, and the 12th São Paulo International Architecture Biennial (CCSP, 2019).

More recently, his artistic practice seeks to expand toward collective environments in which the sense of shared responsibilities overrides authorial intentions. Currently, is co-editor -in collaboration with the Index Literacy Programme- of a publication titled Indexing Imaginaries (DATA Browser/Open Humanities Press, 2022), which explores the concept of indexing as a form of power. He is involved in the micro-histórias initiative at Casa do Povo (SP), which focuses on researching institutional history and he is the coordinator of a multidisciplinary research group called Disposições Infraestruturais, which delves into issues related to art, architecture, and planetarity.

He currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

DOWNLOAD CV