Rachel Valdés, Bio
Rachel Valdés, born in 1990 in Havana, Cuba, is a visual artist. She currently lives and works between Havana and Barcelona.
She graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts San Alejandro, specializing in Painting.
In addition to painting and photography, she has explored various artistic mediums, creating Land Art pieces, public interventions, and large-scale installations.
Through an artistic language that explores perception, materiality, and interaction with the surrounding environment, Valdés has consolidated a body of work that invites introspection and dialogue between the viewer, the artwork, and space.
Her education has been deeply interdisciplinary, and her work ranges from painting to large immersive installations that play with light, reflection, and scale, using materials such as laminated mirrors, glass, stainless steel, and polycarbonate.
“Immersive Art and Expanded Perception”
The central axis of her work lies in the creation of environments that transform the viewer’s perception.
Her interventions establish a connection between tangible reality and the intangible, generating sensory experiences that invite a profound observation of space and of existence itself.
In 2016, her installation “The Beginning of the End” was selected by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Cuban Art Fund, becoming one of her most iconic public interventions.
Exhibited in Times Square, New York, the piece attracted more than two million viewers, transforming the urban landscape into a space for contemplation and collective participation.
“I believe that one of the qualities of public art is its ability to create connections between human beings and the space that surrounds them, provoking unique sensory experiences.”
Her work has been exhibited in numerous international biennials and art fairs, standing out for its ability to transform both space and the viewer’s experience.
Among her most significant projects are:
– “Happily Ever After” (19th Havana Biennial, 2012): A monumental installation measuring 16 meters long by 3 meters high on Havana’s Malecón, where the minimalist structure created a corridor of infinite reflections, generating a psychological and symbolic experience of great visual and conceptual impact.
– “Cubo Azul” (12th Havana Biennial, 2015): Presented as part of the curatorial project “Behind the Wall” (“Detrás del Muro”), this piece was described by historian Eusebio Leal as “A sapphire that belongs to the city,” becoming an icon of public art in Havana. It was later installed at the Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta Museum and, in 2024, became part of the permanent collection of the Gary Nader Sculpture Park, one of the most important sculpture parks in Florida.
– “Infinite Composition” (12th Havana Biennial, 2015 – ARCO Madrid, 2016): A work that transports sensory perception to an abstract and spiritual level, where color, light, and sound create an immersive space that transcends the barriers of time and categorization.
– “Immersion” (Havana Biennial, 2019): An installation acquired as part of the city’s cultural heritage, reaffirming the impact and permanence of her work within the urban context.
Rachel Valdés’ work is framed by a constant search for expanded perception and dialogue between being and space.
Her work is part of prestigious collections, including:
• Gary Nader Sculptural Park Museum, Miami, EE. UU.
• The Donald Rubin Foundation, New York, EE.UU.
• The Rockefeller Brother Foundation, New York, EE.UU.
• Pérez Museum(PAMM), Miami, EE.UU.
• Fundación Calosa, Ciudad de México, México.
• Fundación Gregorio Marañón, Toledo, España.
• Kortrijk Art Collection, Kortrijk, Bélgica.
• Colección Los Carbonell, Miami, EE.UU.
• CIFO, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, EE.UU.
• Colección Luksic-Lería, Santiago de Chile, Chile.
• Colección Maldonado, Miami, EE.UU.
Throughout her career, she has received important awards and grants, which have enabled her to carry out public art projects in Utah and at the Vermont Studio Center, USA.
“I have always been interested in exploring perpetual and sensory questions.
Many times, I seek to distort and reinterpret an environment through different elements arranged in relation to a space. I look for new ways of inhabiting and observing what surrounds us.
I am drawn to the idea of placing the viewer as a fundamental part of the work, offering a state of presence, recognition, and contemplation, creating a dialogue between subject, object, and environment.
I refer to the tension between the different realities that shape human life: the mental and the physical, the objective and the subjective.”
Rachel Valdés is committed to the aesthetic experience without considering a single way of approaching it, because for her everything can lead to reflection, emotions, and feelings—whether we face a work formalized in two or three dimensions, contemplative, retinal, or whether it envelops us in a labyrinth of images, still or moving, even unfinished, in full process of development, assumed both from the ephemeral and circumstantial and from the permanence of its materials.
For her, it is essentially about activating the greatest possible number of symbols, fostering the emergence of new meanings and interpretations within a growing universe of increasingly attractive images, radiated through every possible medium and not necessarily leading to enjoyment, order, or the existence of an open, plural, and transparent way of thinking.
She turns to everything that responds to her intellectual, emotional, and cultural interests: one of her main tools is the search for specific, specialized information about new artistic processes, the technical possibilities offered by scientific advances, and everything happening in art from one end of the planet to the other.
Her academic training was sufficiently democratic to avoid imposing obligations within a specific genre, allowing her instead to explore the most varied paths of creation.
In two words: feeling free, never tied to a single technical or expressive position. Rachel has traveled vast territories of painting, drawing, and photography and, with equal strength and passion, explores the geography of sculpture, objects, and installations, approaching the latter as a sum, a compendium of investigations and inquiries into perception and the correlation between subject and creation, author and viewer, intimacy and circumstantial environments.
That is, everything that exalts to the point of delirium the labyrinths and dictates of the mind, allowing her an emotional translation of her intellectual aspirations as an expression “of the existential phenomena of human beings, of their physical and ideological matter…,” as she has stated on occasion.
Rachel thus confirms a conscious will to give the viewer the possibility of living experiences similar to her own, whether or not they are trained in the universe of art.
She does not act as a magician, nor does she become a visible demiurge or genius seeking to monopolize attention; quite the opposite: her invisibility is essential in sharing experiences by integrating herself into the system of creation-exhibition-reception of art.
She is only an instrument (not “the hand of God,” as once believed), an intangible force determined to activate brushes, metals, glass, oils, wood, mirrors, fabrics, acrylics, cameras and video projectors, lights, in countless works and projects.
Today, hidden beneath the web of high technology and spectacle that attempts to empty any manifestation of human sensitivity and perception of content, emotions and feelings emerge in each of her works and are heightened until they capture all possible attention.
They attract from the very moment they are installed: she does not agree with the idea of delivering something immovable or closed to the viewer; instead, she prefers to embrace the risks of participation and complicity almost from the very moment of production and installation.
She can be seen there on site, attending to every smallest detail, outlining processes, fixing the framework of delicate and complex structures, living that rich social experience as an effective antidote against any sign of isolation or estrangement.
Nelson Herrera Ysla (Curator, Wifredo Lam Center)