Carlos Estévez, “Cludad Reloj (Clock City)”, 2019, Oil and Watercolor Pencil on Canvas, 96 x 96 Inches
Born in Havana in 1969, Miami-based painter and ceramicist Carlos Estévez is known for creating captivating, thought-provoking works in a wide range of media that poetically evoke and express the complexities of the human condition as well as the universal truths that shape our lives. He has done residencies in the Academia de San Carlos, Mexico, the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, and the Citê Internationale des Arts in Paris.
Estévez’s most recent series is his collection entitled “Cities of the Mind” which features nine large-format paintings, all created between 2017 and 2019, that reference the artist’s fascination with city plans. Inspired by the Havana of his youth, the Medieval European cities to which he has traveled extensively as an adult, and his abiding interest in symbolic cosmology and origin stories. Estévez has created in this new body of work personal maps of the human mind influenced by ancient cartography. These works equally address the complicated inner lives that mark the human condition as well as our proclivity for interpreting the world through a self-referential lens.
Carlos Estévez’s work is held in a number of notable public collections, including the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Denver Art Museum; and the Ludwig Forum for International Art, among others. Estévez’s honors include a 2019 Oscar B. Cintas Fellowship; a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2015; and the Grand Prize in the First Salon of Contemporary Cuban Art in Havana awarded in 1995.