An exhibition of Diango Hernández’s Drawing (Third hand), 2006 will open April 4th at Alexander and Bonin. The work, a set of fifty ink drawings, evolved out of Hernández’s interest in the Polish artist Andrzej Wróblewski (1927 – 1957).

Hernández was drawn to Wróblewski because, in him, he saw a “person confused and affected by a political system: confused because I no longer know how to judge the system that formed me, but at the same time deformed me.” It is the sense of deformity that is directly addressed in Drawing (Third hand). The work specifically references one of Wróblewski’s drawings that shows a man with a third arm protruding from his back. Hernández places the ambiguity of this symbolism within his own context of growing up in Cuba. The fifty drawing are a handmade “mass production”, each one a copy of the previous on pages torn from a 1940s German balance book. Each drawing is made unique by drops of water that serve to dissolve the strict repetition of the drawing.

The artist states: “I don’t wonder what will happen to the political mistakes, because the mistakes are obviously mistakes that are always ready to recur again and again in different guises. The big challenge for each one of us in any case will be to become single drops.”

Diango Hernández began his artistic practice in Cuba in 1994 as a co-founder of Ordo Amoris Cabinet, a group of artists and designers who focused on invented solutions for home design objects to compensate for a permanent shortage of materials and goods. Born in 1970 in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, the artist moved to Europe in 2003 and currently lives and works in Düsseldorf. His work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle, Basel in 2006 and in 2007 at the Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen. His work was exhibited in the Arsenale as part of the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, and he exhibited in 2006 at the Biennale of Sydney and the São Paulo Biennial. In April 2009 he will exhibit a solo project at ZONA MACO in Mexico City.