BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1971 in Atlanta, Georgia, Anthony Goicolea is a first-generation Cuban American artist now living and working in Brooklyn, New York. His extended family immigrated to the United States in 1961, fleeing Cuba soon after Castro came to power—a fact that underpins many of the artist’s works.
Goicolea has utilized diverse media to explore elements of his own personal history and family heritage. These poignant, sometimes cinematic, images and installations are characterized by a fervent search for ancestral and social connections to a mythical homeland, Cuba—at once revealing nostalgia for a past that the artist never actually experienced, as well as a pronounced sense of cultural dislocation and estrangement.
Goicolea creates narrative tableaus using a variety of distinct media. Whether painting, photography, video, or drawing, his works are constructed fictional environments born from autobiographical aspects. Hints of history, alienation, estrangement, and fantasy combine to create otherworldly scenes that hover on the boundaries of reality and are in transition from one state to another.
Goicolea has investigated several series of digitally composited topographies, often populated by bands of masked and uniformed figures. In recent series, many of the images are devoid of humans, although the landscape reflects an anonymous and increasingly tenuous human presence. In these works, primitive lean-tos and crudely constructed shanties coexist in an uneasy union with the technological vestiges of an industrialized society. Suggesting a world on the brink of obsolescence, these chilling images further cement the pervasive undercurrent of human alienation—from one another as well as the natural environment—that can be traced throughout the artist’s work.
His paintings are elaborate collaged constructions painted on the front and backside of large sheets of layered frosted mylar film. These complex compositions reveal an analogue process akin to the digital manipulations of his photographic works. They are amalgamations of different natural and unnatural elements borrowed from his ancestral roots and unfold like dimly lit stage sets. New England winters, Southern plantations, and tropical Cuban settings merge into incongruous landscapes that seem impossible but feel familiar. Caught in the moment of transition from day to night or vice-verse, discordant details from disparate locations reveal themselves in the darkening magic hour or in the early morning dawn.
Although his media is diverse, each piece is concerned with conveying a strong narrative within the framework of a fictional world. These narratives address ideas of transience and our notions of regimentation, institutionalism, tradition, ritual and history. The actions of his characters mine the harsh realities of existence within environments that are simultaneously insulated and exposed to a vague outside threat.
Goicolea has exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia—notably at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the International Center of Photography, New York; Postmasters Gallery, New York; Haunch of Venison Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin, Germany; the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain. Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea is the first major traveling museum exhibition devoted solely to his work. Goicolea’s art is held in many public collections, including those of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; as well as the Yale University Art Collection, New Haven, Connecticut; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia.
To date, Goicolea’s work has been the subject of four books. It has been featured in ARTnews, Art in America, Art Forum, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune, among many others. The artist’s grants and awards include a Cintas Fellowship (2006) and the BMW Photo Paris Award (2005) and the Joan Mitchell Fellowship Foundation.
Goicolea holds a B.A. in art history, with a minor in romance languages, and a B.F.A. in drawing and painting—both earned at the University of Georgia, Athens, in 1992 and 1994, respectively. He received an M.F.A. in sculpture and photography, from Pratt Institute of Art, New York, in 1997.