Jairo Alfonso is an archaeologist of things. Over the past decade, his drawings and paintings have taken a hard look at the material environment that surrounds us, holding
up a mirror to our consumer society.
Alfonso’s work has been featured in more than 10 solo exhibitions world wide, including Instrumentaciones, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wilfredo Lam, Havana, Cuba (2000); and in over 60 group shows, including Useless: Machines for Dreaming, Thinking, and Seeing, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2019); Flow: Economies of the Look and Creativity in Contemporary Art from the Caribbean, IDB Cultural Center
Art Gallery, Washington, DC (2014); Cuban America: An Empire State of Mind, Lehmann College Art Gallery, New York (2014); Occupying, Building, Thinking: Poetic and Discursive Perspectives on Contemporary Cuban Video Art (1990–2010), University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa (2013); Politics: I don’t like it, but it likes me, Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland (2013); Killing Time: An Exhibition of Cuban Artists from the ’80s to the Present, Exit Art, New York (2007); and Batiscafo / Proyecto Circo, Eighth Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011).
His often chaotic, unpeopled compositions reveal an underlying ethos of excess and waste. Even though the human body is absent in his work, it is everywhere reflected. Having grown up in communist Cuba under a culture of both scarcity and obsolescence, these topics are constants in his work.
Jairo Alfonso is a Cuban-born artist living and working in Hudson County, New Jersey. He was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1974. He graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) and from the Escuela Nacional de Arte (ENA) in Havana. He has lived in Spain, and moved to the United States in 2013.
He has participated in various artist residencies, including the Foun- tainhead Residency, Miami, Florida (2019); Marble House Project, Dorset, Vermont (2015); and Guttenberg Arts, New Jersey (2014). He was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2017.
Alfonso’s work appears in private collections as well as in the public collections of the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Florida; the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California; the per- manent collection of the province of Hainaut, Belgium; and the Havana Galerie Collection, Zürich, Switzerland, among others.
