Featuring: Carlos Betancourt, Liset Castillo, Celso Castro and Ilan Lieberman.

Territorial Strokes brings together photographs, paintings and drawings from four Latin American artists with four very different attempts to make sense of the worlds they inhabit.

Carlos Betancourt’s photographs show characters carefully arranged in studied compositions. Blending the real and the surreal, Betancourt’s protagonists stand next to a swimming pool dressed in extravagant Havana-Miami style outfits creating scenes in which hot pink and turquoise guide us into the photographs. Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from Cuban parents, he moved to Miami in 1981. Betancourt’s artwork is in public collections, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno in the Canary Islands, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, San Antonio Museum of Art, the Lowe Art Museum and the Bass Museum in Miami and the Museum of Latin American Art in California.

Celso Castro’s provocative works of art are both photographs and collages. In an effort to deconstruct the masculinity and power that are integral to the definition of maleness in his native Colombia, Castro has convinced his subjects to pose in various states of undress despite their fear-inducing status as murderers, guerrillas, soldiers, pimps and prostitutes. He served as a cultural attaché to Colombia in Italy before returning to his country to document its story.

The earth, its origins and evolution, and the relative state of its inhabitants are the ideas behind Liset Castillo’s work. In her contribution to Territorial Strokes, Castillo creates models of suburban settings in arid regions which attempt to make sense of the isolation of our existence even in supposedly neighbourly settings. When these models are photographed, the resulting artwork attempts to humanize the inherent loneliness. Castillo was born in Cuba and lives and works in Amsterdam. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and an Oscar B. Cintas Fellowship.

Nature is the protagonist of Ilan Lieberman’s Grass series. Using photorealistic techniques, he creates vegetal surfaces which are organic and alive and impossibly identical. Dissolution, the passage of time, and the ephemeral nature of memory are materialized in his series of panels. He resides in his native Mexico.