DAGOBERTO RODRÍGUEZ
“Lengua trópica” l Fundación Cajasol l Sevilla, SPAIN l April 28 - May 31 2026
Opening of Lengua Trópica, an exhibition by internationally acclaimed Cuban artist Dagoberto Rodríguez, at Fundación Cajasol in Seville, co-produced with VF Art Projects and curated by Reyes Abad Flores.
Dagoberto Rodríguez (Caibarién, Cuba, 1969) is a key figure in contemporary Latin American art. His career gained international prominence as co-founder of the Cuban collective Los Carpinteros, which transformed the global art scene through a singular fusion of architecture, design, and sculpture, marked by sharp social irony and political critique. In 2015, the collective participated in the Venice Biennale as part of the Latin American Pavilion.
As an independent artist, Dagoberto Rodríguez has further developed his own symbolic language, first from his studio in Havana and later from Madrid. Humor and irony remain central to his practice, allowing him to address political and social issues such as systems of power, armed conflict, and humanitarian crises including the displacement of refugees.
His work has been widely exhibited and is held in major museum collections including Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and Tate Modern, among many others.
Lengua Trópica—through its recurring use of the trope—reflects the artist’s commitment to the fluid relationship between language and object. Through the transformation of everyday elements, the exhibition explores political and social questions, as well as the legitimacy of popular culture, drawing on the tensions between the practical and the symbolic.
The exhibition brings together a diverse set of theoretical, visual, and functional resources that address themes such as political propaganda, patriotic symbolism, and the cultural archaeology of Rodríguez’s native Cuba. It also proposes reflections on the perception of space and on the imaginaries of global technological civilization.
Formed in a context marked by political repression, control, and scarcity, the artist turned ingenuity—understood as a tool of resistance—into a visual language of his own. This identity was consolidated during his years as co-founder of Los Carpinteros, a seminal collective that reshaped both Latin American and international contemporary art from the 1990s through nearly three decades.
With more than 40 works, Lengua Trópica establishes a dialogue between that collective period and Rodríguez’s most recent individual production. The exhibition is enriched by a wide range of formats, including watercolor on paper, installation, video, photography, sculpture, and painting, unfolding multiple narratives across the galleries.
As a special highlight, the exhibition opens in the Velázquez Room with Constrictora, a historic work by Los Carpinteros, first and only shown in 2015 in São Paulo, Brazil. At Fundación Cajasol in Seville, this major work—of exceptional artistic significance—is presented once again, and for the first time in Europe.