Marimón and Cuban artist Kcho team up for the gallery's reopening

The Spanish-American artist is a frequent visitor to the island, where he has public works on the street.
"The damned circumstance of water everywhere." Virgilio Piñera's verse, which opens his poetry collection, "The Island in Weight," makes sense again when seeing the work of his compatriot Kcho. Since the 1990s, this Cuban artist has built a universe of canoes, propellers, salvaged wood, and symbols of travel (or possible shipwreck). This language, born of insularity and exile, has made him, today, a recognizable voice in contemporary Latin American art.

The artist now arrives in Palma to inaugurate the new phase of the Marimón gallery on the occasion of Art Night. Its director, Biel Perelló, explains that "after some health problems, I reconsidered whether I wanted to continue, but I did it out of responsibility for the artists who have passed through here." And what better way to support an international figure like Kcho, whom the gallery owner defines as "the ideal artist to reopen the doors with an ambitious exhibition."
The exhibition, curated by Perelló together with Tomeu Simonet, brings together five large-format canvases and one medium-format one, along with a central sculpture that becomes the focal point of the show. The exhibition functions almost as an installation, generating a whole in which works from 2008 dialogue with a more recent one, from 2024, in which color emerges as an unexpected counterpoint between the large, almost monochrome canvases.

This artist's work is inseparable from the sea and its metaphors: boats, oars, fragments of vessels, remnants of the journey. In short, symbols of the migration suffered by his country. In Marimón, these elements are present in canvases with dense and oppressive atmospheres, where propellers and canoes seem to float in the middle of a harrowing or dense landscape. "When I see his works, I also think about everything that's happening in the Mediterranean and the immigration we're experiencing in Europe," notes the space's manager.

Alexis Leyva Machado, known by his pseudonym Kcho, trained at the National School of Art in Havana. His international career took off in his native country, and he debuted shortly after at the prestigious Gladstone Gallery in New York. Since then, he has worked with galleries such as Marlborough and Joan Prats, and has exhibited at leading institutions such as MoMA in New York and the Reina Sofía. He has also participated in events, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel.

Throughout his career, the artist has received, among other awards, the South Korean Biennial, the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts, and other distinctions awarded by his country, such as the National Culture Award and the Cuban Diploma of Artistic Merit.
However, this is not the first time Palma has encountered Kcho's work. It's worth noting that for years he was represented by the Joan Guaita gallery. Thanks to this relationship with the island, one of his public sculptures stands in the Parc de la Mar: two vertical Corten steel boats facing the blue of the bay.
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