Double Portrait included a selection of recent works by Ivonne Ferrer centered on the series Humanity’s Gambit. The exhibition made it possible to observe an extension of the original project through new pieces that retained the conceptual structure based on chess as an organizing system, where each element operates in relation to the others, without fixed hierarchies and without belonging to a single narrative.

The large-scale three-dimensional board connects the game to multiple narrative associations, through processes of reorganization, remixing, and the play of correspondences between self-referential knowledge and the metaphor of the vital 'gambit. Within this framework, Ferrer mobilizes the idea of fictional narration—centered, erased, mimetic, and projected outward—interwoven with elements of social and historical reference. From its inception, the project has been sustained by the logic of combination. The board functions as a model of relations, where each piece acquires meaning according to its position and its potential movements. This system enables parallels between the game and broader dynamics tied to decision-making, conflict, and strategy. The work does not represent these ideas directly; it activates them through its own internal structure.

On this occasion, Ferrer presented approximately twenty new pawns that expand the scope of the series. The pieces introduced a significant material variation in relation to earlier versions: a matte surface, less reflective. This shift reduced the emphasis on glossy finish and redirected attention toward form, volume, and the relationships between the pieces within the exhibition space. The ensemble gained in visual density and in perceptual control.

Ferrer’s work has been described as the result of a research process that articulates historical, social, and biographical references into complex visual systems. In this case, that methodology translates into a three-dimensional device that combines simple rules with multiple possibilities of configuration. The pieces do not function as isolated objects; they operate as units within a system open to variation, displacement, and continuous re-reading.

Within the exhibition, the relationship between the works and the space of The Annex Gallery enabled a clear reading of the project as an open structure. The arrangement of elements avoided any closed narrative effect and favored an experience grounded in the observation of formal and conceptual relations. Humanity’s Gambit was presented as a system in operation, where meaning is constructed through the viewer’s movement and anchored in individual experience.

Biographical Summary of Ivonne Ferrer

Ferrer is a Cuban artist whose trajectory has been consolidated over more than three decades through a sustained practice that interweaves research, memory, and material experimentation. Since her earliest exhibitions in the 1990s—across venues in Havana, Barcelona, and Granada—her work has been marked by a persistent engagement with the intersections of the intimate and the historical, the symbolic and the everyday. These early concerns took form in projects such as Attributions (1990) and The Temperature of God (1993), where an analytical sensibility was already evident, turning each work into a site of critical inquiry.

Over the course of her career, Ferrer has developed a language that moves between assemblage, installation, and the expanded object, integrating biographical, social, and cultural elements into complex structures that unsettle established narratives. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, and Latin America, including venues such as Kendall Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas (MOCAA), the Marco Island Center for the Arts, and galleries in Miami, Madrid, Rome, and San Juan. This international trajectory has reinforced the transnational condition of her practice, where displacement and recontextualization operate as conceptual axes.

In recent years, her production has reached a notable level of maturity, evident in exhibitions such as Infinite Progressions. Ivonne Ferrer’s Selected Works (2014–2024) at MIFA, Miami, as well as in her participation in multiple recent curatorial projects aligned with contemporary discourses on gender, memory, and territory. Her presence in group exhibitions such as Ancestral Lines, Across the Everglades, Crossing the Divide, and DIVERSEartPB confirms her relevance within the current landscape, as well as her capacity to engage diverse contexts without relinquishing discursive coherence.

Ferrer’s work is held in significant public and institutional collections, including the Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA), the Museum of Arts & Sciences (MOAS), MoCAA, and various collections in the United States, Spain, and Cuba. This institutional presence does more than affirm the relevance of her work; it situates it within an expanded genealogy of contemporary Latin American art. Taken as a whole, her practice can be understood as an open system of visual thought, where each piece operates as a critical intervention into human experience—its fractures and its continuities. Since 2020, she has served as director of the Fine Art Ceramic Center at MoCAAmericas.

Biographical Summary of Ciro Quintana

Quintana is a Cuban visual artist born in Havana, belonging to the generation of the 1980s—a decisive cohort in the renewal of contemporary Cuban art. Trained at the Escuela Elemental de Artes Plásticas “20 de Octubre,” the Academia San Alejandro, and the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, he also completed studies in photo-engraving and silkscreen in Cuba, a technical foundation that helps account for the breadth of resources present in his work. Since 1993, he has lived in the United States, based in Miami, a city from which he has sustained an international trajectory.

Regarded as one of the emblematic voices of Cuban art of his generation, Quintana has constructed a pictorial language driven by a strong narrative impulse, where figuration, cultural memory, popular imaginaries, art history, cinema, comic aesthetics, parody, and social commentary converge. In his own terms, his work emerges from a search for system and from a strategic use of the image as seduction, trap, and narrative device. Painting, drawing, collage, and installation operate as sites where reality appears mediated by signs, fictions, and iconographies held in constant tension.

Across more than four decades of practice, his work has been exhibited in Cuba, the United States, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Finland, Peru, Venezuela, and beyond. Since the late 1980s, he has received multiple recognitions, including drawing and painting awards in Havana, a gold medal at the First Caribbean and Central American Biennial in Santo Domingo, and fellowships such as the Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Artist at Giverny Fellowship, associated with the Fondation Monet in France. His work is held in significant public and institutional collections, including the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba, the Ludwig Forum for International Kunst, and the Lowe Art Museum, among others in Europe and the United States.

At present, Quintana maintains an active production and a clear exhibition presence. In 2026, he presented the solo exhibition Waking up from the American Dream at the Centro de Arte Tomás y Valiente (CEART) in Fuenlabrada, a project centered on works that examine, through symbolic and critical means, themes of identity, dream, belonging, and disenchantment. These recent exhibitions confirm the continuity of a practice that, far from exhausting itself in citation or formal virtuosity, continues to operate as a sharp visual reflection on contemporary culture, its mythologies, and its fractures.