Carlos Barberena. (Granada, Nicaragua. 1972.)
I am a Nicaraguan Visual Artist living in Chicago, IL, USA.
I have had solo shows in Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua and United States of America, and my work has been shown in various Art Fairs, Art Biennials, Museums and Galleries in many places including Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Costa Rica, Germany, Italy, Spain, USA, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. I have created many installations in public spaces in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Venezuela. My work is included in private and public collections, among them The International Exlibriscentrum, Stedelijke Museum in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium, the Lia Bermudez Museum in Venezuela, The Printmaking Workshop (Taller de Formación y Producción Gráfica), in Patzcuaro, Mexico, the National Gallery (Galeria Nacional) of Costa Rica, the Cultural Museum of the Caribbean (Museo Cultural del Caribe) in Venezuela, the Praxis Gallery in Nicaragua.
Since 1990, art has given me the freedom to travel over the ocean of my memories, permitting me to express my sentiments and through this, dig deeply into the vastness of human knowledge, knowledge which has helped me to better understand the world that surrounds us.
For me art is a powerful form of communication, which I employ to make reflections and question the issues that we live in our contemporary society, the fears, the desires, the hopelessness, and the nonsense
With my work, I seek to be a vector of change, collecting images that pertain to our collective memory and that, in certain form, make reference to painful events in the history of my country and of the world.
I hope never to become inactive nor esthetically dead before the period in which we are living. I hope to react without fear in order to say what needs to be said in the moment in needs to be said. However, because of this, some, related to the infrastructures that make art a business, will try to curtail my freedom by censuring my work.
Website: www.carlosbarberena.com