Alexandre Arrechea at the Museum of Latin American Art

Alexandre Arrechea, Intersected Horizons (installation view) (2023–24). Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art.

Intersected Horizons is the first West Coast museum survey dedicated to Afro-Cuban artist Alexandre Arrechea. Presented across two main galleries and two smaller corridor-like spaces at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), the exhibit features nearly two decades of Arrechea’s rich artistic explorations, spanning installation, textile, sculpture, painting, and video art. Whether reworking everyday objects or reconstructing recognizable buildings, Arrechea investigates the ties that bind architecture, spatial design, and power, revealing the ways that our perceptions and lived experiences are informed by deep-seated hierarchies of inequality and violence.

In the first gallery, three projected videos show the development of large-scale public projects like Orange Functional (2022), a brightly colored metal structure with sprouting basketball hoops for branches. In the center of the room, a ridged white platform holds small-scale renderings of these projects, including the No Limits series (2013), which features skyscrapers and other iconic metropolitan structures that Arrechea has manipulated into surreal and contorted forms. The Empire State Building coils like a snail in Empire; Court House transforms the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, also in Manhattan, into an ouroboros. Though playfully absurd in their appearance, Arrechea’s distortion of important U.S. buildings challenges our perception of the political and economic structures these spaces represent.

In the adjacent gallery, the large, circular floor installation Landscape and Hierarchies (n.d.) explores socio-environmental themes. The island-like golf course is complete with a lime green roadway track, over 160 glass sculptures, a golf club, and a golf ball. Reminiscent of sturdy trees, the glass sculptures placed along the inner and outer perimeter of the track appear in varying shades of green, blue, yellow, orange, and brown. The golf club and ball bisect the track near the one o’clock position. With long-held associations to wealth and exclusivity, golf courses consume vast tracts of land, displacing natural habitats and disrupting local ecosystems. Here, the golf club and the ball, and by proxy, the human hands that can handle or mishandle the club, act as reminders of the covert forces that shape our relationships with the landscapes that surround us.

From basketball courts and golf courses to multi-unit dwellings and skyscrapers, Arrechea’s work reveals how visible and invisible hierarchies influence the many ways we move through and experience built environments. The whimsy of his works offers playful grounds for the critical contemplation of the structures of power within them, reveling in the fact that hierarchies are meant to be critiqued, disrupted, and sometimes, fully reimagined.

Alexandre Arrechea: Intersected Horizons runs from September 10, 2023–May 2024 at the Museum of Latin American Art (628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach, CA 90802).

Alexandre Arrechea, Intersected Horizons (installation view) (2023–24). Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art.

Alexandre Arrechea, Orange Functional(video still) (2022). Video, 59 seconds. Image courtesy of the artist.

Alexandre Arrechea, Intersected Horizons (installation view) (2023–24). Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Latin American Art.

Alexandre Arrechea, Paisaje Suicida (2008). Wood and formica, 59 x 75.5 x 22.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Alexandre Arrechea, Shery Netherland (installation view) (2021). Stainless steel. 27 x 27 x 3 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Alexandre Arrechea, Fish bite (2022). Ink on wood, 26 x 55 x 1.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Alitzah Oros is an art historian currently based in Los Angeles.

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