Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, August 6, 2026: Los Carpinteros, a Cuban artist collective (#2598)

The Havana-based collective Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters) have created some of the most important work to emerge from Latin America in the past decade. Formed in 1992 (Marco Castillo, Dagoberto Rodríguez, and, until his departure in June 2003, Alexandre Arrechea), Los Carpinteros adopted their name in 1994, deciding to renounce the notion of individual authorship and refer back to an older guild tradition of artisans and skilled laborers. Interested in the intersection between art and society, their oeuvre occupies an intriguing and ambiguous space between conceptualism, activism and formalism. Merging architecture, design, and sculpture in unexpected and often playful ways, their elegant and mordantly humorous work negotiates between the functional and the nonfunctional, drawing inspiration from the physical world—particularly that of architectural constructions. Their carefully crafted drawings and installations use wit to exploit a visual syntax that sets up contradictions between object and function  as well as practicality and uselessness.

For Los Carpinteros, drawing has played an integral role as a mock technical draft or blueprint, suggesting not only a process of artistic elaboration but also as architectural or carpentry plans.

In their work the artists incorporate aspects of architecture, design and sculpture to create installations and drawings that “negotiate the space between the functional and the nonfunctional", where they derive their “inspiration from the physical world” and express their interest in the intersection of art and society in a humorous manner. Los Carpinteros create a response to places, spaces and objects, how they have been conceived, built, used and abandoned.

Los Carpinteros’ works are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the TATE Gallery, London; the Museo de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; the Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art Foundation, Vienna, Austria; the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

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