Fernando Sánchez Castillo
*Madrid, 1970
lives and works in
Madrid
Hidden Liberty
D´après Laboulaye and Bartholdi, 2017
lime wood
170 x 38 x 40 cm
Selected Exhibitions:
Tate Modern in London, GB, 1999; Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Germany, 2001; MoMA PS1 New York, U.S., 2003; 50° Biennale Venezia, Italy ,2003; Biennale von São Paulo, Brasil, 2004; Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Netherlands, 2006 and 2007; ARCO Madrid, Spain, 2012; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, 2012; Gijon, Spain, 2013; Bienal de Melle, France, 2013; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2015; Kunsraum Innsbruck, Austria, 2016; Manifesta Zürich, Switzerland, 2016
Fernando Sánchez Castillo (Madrid, 1970) has created a new work specially for the exhibition: ‘Hidden Liberty,
D´après Laboulaye and Bartholdi’ (2017), a wooden sculpture of the Statue of Liberty portrayed as a dark-skinned woman. In his works, Sánchez Castillo explores the way in which cultural memory is born and how political power over official accounts and images comes about. A central conflict concerns the deconstruction of monuments, which he challenges as tools of power and representation. Here the Statue of Liberty, an extraordinary symbol of freedom, independence and, initially, the end of slavery, has turned into the emblem of the ‘American way of life’, with dark-skinned Liberty taking on a complex significance in the current context of Donald Trump's America and its relationship with her own history.