Carlos Estévez is one of Cuba's best-known young artists. Estévez, just 31, lives and works in a cramped two-room studio in Old Havana. Cheerful, articulate and outgoing, he has already exhibited in both of the last two Havana Biennials, in 1997 and in 2000. In 1995, only three years after graduating from Havana's Instituto Superior del Arte (ISA), he won the grand prize in the First Show of Contemporary Cuban Art sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts; the year before he was awarded the top prize in Havana's City Show.

Estévez' Biennial work last November, Botellas al mar (Bottles to the Sea), an installation of 100 drawings on paper and 100 glass bottles, which will be tossed into the sea in the various parts of the world he visits, received wide critical acclaim. His work has been seen here in many group shows and he has had two one-man shows at the Couturier Gallery in Los Angeles. He is currently doing his second residency in New York, this is one at a foundry in Garrison, New York where he is completing his first massive sculpture in bronze. His show at the Cuban Art Space consists of 15 drawings and two installations (some of which can be seen by clicking on the thumbnail images).

Last June (2000), Annette Grant, writing in The New York Times, commented:

"Mr. Estévez, 30, has always known he wanted to be an artist and went to art school at 13. He is the son of an engineer, and it shows in the elegant craftsmanship of his work, which is largely concerned with metaphysical transformation. In drawings and installations, he has recreated the medieval bestiary in a modern anthropological fable, and examined history through figures like Joan of Arc, Isadora Duncan, Karl Marx, José Martí and Abraham Lincoln. He has also produced elaborate metaphors for creativity: the brain represented by coils of music staves, for example. . . . While Mr. Estévez' work has intellectual roots, it is also highly accessible . . . "