ALONSO CARTU
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Cartú is a Multidisciplinary artist who explores space and materiality through different time-activated elements such as frozen ink, melting wax, ice and butter, combined with the more stable structures of plaster, concrete, ceramics, wood and canvas. For the past ten years he has dedicated his practice to the fields of architecture, sculpture and design in different schools and workshops in Mexico City, Paris, London, New York and Japan.
In 2015 he received his BA Architecture Degree from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; his thesis “Ruinas Contemporáneas” (Contemporary Ruins) received the Abraham Zabludovsky award for the best thesis in architectural composition; In 2019 he completed his Master in Fine Arts Degree at Parsons, The New School, graduating with Departmental Honors and representing Parsons at New York Design Week alongside SVA, Pratt and The Cooper Union.
Cartú received the honorable mention in the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award; he was selected as a finalist for the MTV RE:DEFINE Award presented by The Goss-Michael Foundation 2019, and nominated for the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture in the same year.
His works have been featured in Architectural Digest, GQ, Design Boom, Sculptor Magazine and many other international publications and online blogs. He currently lives and works between Mexico City and New York.
In his work he portrays loss because he has lost someone and you have too, or will. He shows that he is scared and that you are too, or have been. It’s not a particular religion that he is interested in, but researching spirituality as a universal driver of human existence. It’s not just gender or a specific sexual orientation that he wants to show, but sexuality itself as a wider and more fascinating subject. It’s not just the death of someone that moves him, but the general fragility of life, and how we deal with losing it. Cartú works with excitement, joy, mystery, pain and nostalgia as concepts that have led him to create a body of work that connects materiality with the ideas of a universal human experience.