Pace Welcomes Alejandro Piñeiro Bello

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello paints the sociocultural mystic splendor of Caribbean culture with a focus on the Caribbean diaspora, Cuba, and the surrounding island nations’ identities, and histories. This fall, Pace’s gallery in London will stage the largest exhibition to date—and first in the UK—of works by Miami-based Piñeiro Bello, running from September 3 to 28, 2024. Pace’s representation and work on behalf of the artist will be pursued in collaboration with KDR, Miami.

Piñeiro Bello’s practice is deeply informed by the emotional and sensory experience of his life between Havana and Miami. Using traditional materials, such as oil on raw linen or burlap, he creates striking dialogues between the deep beige of the canvas and an iridescent palette of jade greens, oranges, purples, and teals. Chromatic interplay in Piñeiro Bello’s work fortifies essential compositional structures, which often appear to revolve around an unseen center point. In these images, his loosely handled paint forms endless landscapes that travel from dreamlike figuration to pure abstraction. Drawing inspiration from dreams and memories, Piñeiro Bello’s paintings describe fleeting, timeless feeling.

While Piñeiro Bello shares a visual language with his predecessors such as Wifredo Lam and Manuel Mendive, his work also stylistically references painters such as Paul Gauguin, Hokusai, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and Wassily Kandinsky. Piñeiro Bello honed his skills as an artist at The National Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro, Havana, Cuba (2006–2010). He was awarded grants from The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, New York and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York in collaboration with Pioneer Works, New York. Piñeiro Bello was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in 2022. His works are held in public collections such as The Rubell Museum, Miami; Marquez Art Projects, Miami; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale; The Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; The Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; The Brownstone Foundation Collection, Paris; The Chrysler Museum, Virginia; and the Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles.

Titled Entre El Día Y La Noche (Between Day and Night), Piñeiro Bello’s exhibition this September will feature new paintings, works on paper, and a sculpture that symbolically and formally explore cyclical journeys through time, and within the self. The paintings on view in London take their inspiration from the atmospheric and emotional changes throughout a Cuban night and day.

The scale of works in Entre El Día Y La Noche represent some of the artist’s most ambitious to date, the largest of which spans over six meters. In these paintings, Piñeiro Bello employs the structural qualities of classical Western art history while upending expectations of the landscape through his alchemical use of color and non-linear storytelling. Reflecting the island’s rich intercultural heritage, Piñeiro Bello’s practice is equally informed by the fiction, poetry, and music of his birthplace. Just as in the literary genre of lo real maravilloso (the marvelous real), these paintings depict the fantastic through an amplification—rather than transcendence—of perceived reality. Inhered in the layers of Piñeiro Bello’s compositions lie the metamorphic, expressive juxtapositions of Latin America.

To learn more about Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, click here.