Diango Hernández’s oeuvre is both political and poetical. His materials are found and secondhand antennas, telegraph poles, plastic chairs, the Internet, the political situation in his home country Cuba, or sculptural, acoustic arrangements of record players and loudspeakers. His oeuvre is doubtlessly rooted in the Cuba of the nineteen-nineties after the demise of the Soviet Union and the accompanying breakdown of the nationalized Cuban economy. The artists of the Gabinete Ordo Amoris, which he co-founded, created objects and installations revealing the permanent scarcity of all essential commodities as both creative potential and scandalous poverty.
Hernández continues to be concerned with documentary arrangements which create parallel worlds through fiction and narration, abstraction and realism and which, in spite of their social involvement, preserve a specific melancholic beauty. Arising out of this latently illegal context between art and political demands are Hernández’s drawings, which up to today serve as the basis for his artistic work. His ironical-poetical collages derived from communism and everyday life join a collective past and private mythologies into large-scale installations which respond in like measure to the respective exhibition site and the artist’s own aesthetic cosmos.
Catalogue: This comprehensive overview of current contemporary German art surveys the latest developments in a country not only reunified, east and west, but one with Europe. In recent years, more and more foreign artists have chosen to live and work in Germany. This volume offers a snapshot of their increasingly interdependent ecosystem, where national tradition mingles with cultural exchange. The book doesn’t group its 50 featured subjects by region of origin–half are from some kind of international background–or even necessarily by their current homes: it tracks the places where their works have been created, treating artistic production as an outcome of living and working together. Its subjects include a few of the most promising newcomers around, including Candice Breitz, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Sabine Hornig, Bjørn Melhus, Jonathan Monk, Diango Hernández, Julian Rosefeldt, Florian Slotawa, Simon Starling and Amelie von Wulffen. ISBN: 9783775719858, FORMAT: Paperback, 9 x 10.5 in. / 360 pgs / 200 color, PUBLISHER: Hatje Cantz
