Garciandía / Balkenhol

Opening: Thursday, March 06, 7 PM

Exhibition: March 06 — April 12, 2025

Mai 36 Madrid is pleased to present a two person exhibition by Flavio Garciandía and Stephan Balkenhol.

Flavio Garciandía is one of Cuba’s leading and most influential artists and is regarded as one of the fathers of Central and South American conceptual art. The artist was a key figure on the vibrant Cuban art scene of the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1984 he was a co-founder of the Havana Biennal. In his paintings he makes a profound connection with his native Cuba: through the way his works unite a range of postmodern styles, his creative output indirectly adapts and reflects Cuban culture as a fusion of diverse influences and terms of references. The artist cites the history of modern art: his colourful compositions adapt a variety of stylistic directions, from cubism to conceptualism and abstract expressionism. The resulting artistic signature is one that the artist himself describes, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as New Tropical Abstraction – playing on the meteorological term Tropical Depression, which refers to a group of thunderstorms under a closed cloud cover.

Stephan Balkenhol is the premier spirit behind the revival of figurative sculpture in the early 1980s. He began making his trademark figurative sculptures in response to the abstract, minimalist and conceptual strategies of the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, on a heritage that ranges from early Christian sculpture to Modernism. Stephan Balkenhol's work is characterised by his colourfully painted and roughly hewn wooden sculptures and reliefs. Balkenhol's motifs are larger-than-life or dwarflike men, women and animals, heads and hybrid figures of humans and animals sculpted from huge tree trunks. The same tree trunks also serve as the plinths, which are inseparably joined to the figure. Marks made by the tools, grooves, fissures and cracks remain visible, testifying to the working process. This does not preclude a strong sense of realism, reinforced by the treatment of contours, the pose of the figures and the way they are painted.