Los Carpinteros (Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez) is an internationally acclaimed Cuban artist collective best known for merging architecture, sculpture, design and drawing. From the outset in the early 1990s, Los Carpinteros’s work has reflected on social transformations in post-revolutionary, socialist Cuba, offering critical commentary of dominant ideologies and power structures with humor and artistry. Mixing aesthetic execution with political underpinning and a sense of irony with nostalgia, the subversive artworks of Los Carpinteros remain equivocal and open-ended. Los Carpinteros’s Cuba Va! features two videos from 2018, Comodato and Retráctil, and a group of LED sculptural portraits. The films and portraits produce a social landscape of Cuba’s modern history that has been at once utopian and dystopian, idealist and brutalist, promising and devastating. Cuba Va! is on exhibition at The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW, from Oct. 10 to Jan. 12. phillipscollection.org.
